I am on my third recent grow and i use tap water that is unfiltered. Whenever i fill my 5 gallon containers i smell bleach. I don’t always have time to let it sit and dechlorinate like tonight. Got back from a little trip and they are thirsty. I’ve heard an argument for filtered and unfiltered. What do you guys think?
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I use tap water unfiltered. It measures at 90-95 ppm. The only thing i feel that benefits froms letting the water sit out for a day or so is that the PH will stabilize. Seems to be easier to adjust ph after adding nutes. It all depends on your tap water.
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I used to but stopped because im lazy. Couldnt edit the last post but, you need to find out if your water company uses chloramine because it doesnt off gas as readily as chlorine.
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i would use tap water but dont like whats in it(here), wont drink it,wont let the girls drink it.
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no only the finest Svalbarði polar ice water for my girls
J/K I used RO water for my first grow an tap water for the others.
Tap water worked fine but like others said depends on your local water.
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Depends, lots of people add chlorine regularly to their res, me including.
If you are running beneficials (orca, vodoo, BM etc) that might be an issue.
Could add a little more of those products after a day or 2, the roots themselves are just fine with typical tap water amounts of chlorine.
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We are unfiltered. But our water is 60ppm out of the tap.
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It also depends on your growing style and medium. I use living soil and prefer the least amount of chlorine/chloramine in my water. I throw a handful of dirt in mine, to get the chloramine to attach, and let it sit for a day or two to let the chlorine dissipate. This will kill the least amount of beneficials in my soil.
Having said that, some argue that there are so many beneficials in this growing style that full strength chlorine and chloramine make a little difference, and that plants require some chlorine anyhow. It’s personal preference truly. I’ve never had a chlorine deficiency, so I’ll keep doing what I do.
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I use tap water and it smells like chlorine so I fill a 30 gal Rez and add a air pump with 2 air stones for a ew hours
I’ve left that same Rez air by itself for 24 hours and still found a smell
But no smell of chlorine with the air pump at all
Also depending on your water supply there is a great deal on minerals that the plant needs
Paps
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I use tap, my locals area only uses chlorine. I don’t run organic so it actually helps keep microbes at bay. I haven’t had an issue yet! (But again I’m running non organic hydro.)
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I use my well water unfiltered. I did use an RO machine for years but couldn’t find replacement filters the last time and don’t have the dough for a new machine.
My well water is quite hard but has a good PH. I don’t have the ability to check the PPM but have noticed heavy deposits on my smart pouches by harvest.
For treated city water I always found it best to fill a large trash can and let it sit for 24-48 hours to get rid of the chlorine or whatever. Airstones would speed that up and also an RO machine might be a good idea also.
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I only use tap as i’m too cheap to go buy an RO unit 
For soil stuff I use Seachem Safe to dechlorinate it.
For hydro I don’t, and then I add bleach on top.
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I used to use unfiltered city tap water and it was fine. I wouldn’t sweat it. The only reason I use RO now is because we have a 5gal RO system for drinking water, and it gives me peace of mind that my organic water-only soil isn’t getting pushed one direction for pH or getting too much calcium, as was the case with the tap water in Albuquerque that’s mostly from limestone aquifers and had a pH of 8.5 - 9.0.
Just as a thought experiment for people worried about chlorine/chloramines hurting their organic grows, has anyone tried disinfecting anything with chlorinated tap water? Give it a shot and please report back. My experience is it doesn’t disinfect anything, as the chlorine dose is so low, even if you can smell it. I imagine it won’t do much of anything to your grows either unless the pH is way off.
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Rain water. If the barrel is low, fish tank water, I change the fishes water once a week. Plants like it, but fish poo might give too much nitrite for plants in flower. Chlorinated water : crappy weed.
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Ive never had problems with my tap water either. And, sometimes when im in a time pinch i will use it straight out of the tap. Chlorine is actually a micro nutrient from my understanding.
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This is easily proved wrong by several threads in this forum.
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I use my well water unfiltered also and it has a ppm of 420 on a 500 scale, so .84EC. The thing is it comes in between 7.1-7.3 ph and hasn’t given much issues.
Once I found a local water report I seen I just need to add some Epsom salts to get the cal:mag ratio to the more ideal range. But other than that and seedlings not liking it I haven’t had any issues. Once the seedlings get their second set of real leaves they grow fine.
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I use tap water… my tap water is 41ppm I put some cal mag in it to bring it up to 160ppm
I use distilled water when I’m mixing nutes for feeding the kids,
But if it’s just watering between feeds tap water leave it sitting in open gallon containers for 24 hours
Then add cal mag bought a little fish tank pump and air stone ,I let it bubble for 30 minutes
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Get aquarium dechlorinator if you’re concerned. I like Seachem Prime (Seachem just makes good shit) for that purpose, but if you have a lot of water, sodium thiosulfate is what you want. Far cheaper than R/O, especially if you have hard water, where R/O is less efficient.
I use tapwater, but I don’t use organics so point is moot.
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Yeah this is what I was saying. Seachem Safe, what I’ve been using, is the powder version of Prime and a 250g bottle(~$12) will dechlorinate something like 60,0000 gallons. Save tons of money compared to Prime and yeah, same thing ^^
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