Deionized Water?

[mod12man]

Starting up my my first indoor grow in years, and had a quick question about water. I have a reverse osmosis deionized filter system that I have used for years in my reef tank. I can bypass the deionizer cartridge if needed. So my question is.. deionize or not to deionize?

 

[!!!]

Deionizing means removing the ions (salts) in the water, like Cl-, Ca+ etc. Having a little chlorine/calcium/etc is OK and probably useful. If your tap water is not hard (<70ppm calcium) I would use it as-is, otherwise RO/deionized would work.

 

[Dregs]

For what its worth, I was using my Reef RO/DI unit to make water and I was having a hell of a time with deficiencies and getting it dialed in. I started using tap water bubbled for 24 hours and all is well with the world again. Take it for what its worth, I was pretty new at the time and who knows, there was probably 10 other things I was screwing up..

 

[FreezerBoy]

One of the first lessons the inventors of hydro learned was purified water was dead water. It wasn't poison, just useless. Weed isn't a reef tank where every rare and delicate creature is captured in the wild. Weed is, well, a weed that has survived 20,000 years of mans best effort to eradicate it.

Depending on the scale, my tap is 250-384 PPM. Works great.