Distilled water as an emergency measure?

[Navanod]

First post after lurking around for awhile

Just wanna know the expert's thoughts on keeping some distilled water on "standby" to guard against crashes in pH or sudden spikes in other water parameters?

At about 50 cents from NTUC for a 1.5L bottle, its not expensive if it'll dilute the tank water and moderate things abit to save the occupants.

Beats doing emergency wc using unaged tap water right?

[trevally]

If you have a small tank, it should be alright to do water change with distilled water. However if the tank is large, how to cope with the numberous bottles of distilled water you got to purchase from ntuc ? Using tap water with water conditioner (anti-chlorine/chloramine ) is still the most effective way.

[Andrew Soh]

Do you think distill water is good for aquatic animals?

Use of water source that is mineral-free for long term may cause deformity and retardation of growth.....in my observation.

In my opinion, water-conditioner like sodium thiosulfate is good enough for immediate use. With the present water-treatment method in Singapore which is chloramine. Just aging the water ...even for a few days ...may not help.

Once ST is given, the water is ready to use. I have use municipal water treated with ST immediately after treatment for export packing to Europe (countless times)....and never encountered problem....or water-related adversity.

Thank you and take care,
Andrew

[Navanod]

Thanks for the replies to my noobish post

Its not for huge tanks and certainly not for long term or regularly. Just a stop gap measure when sudden deaths happens and a quick water change is needed

sodium thiosulfate...will look into that as well as I'm using this AP "Genesis" to treat tap water (in addition to aging the water for 24 hours), perhaps that's the active component in it.

Thanks!