How do I prepare the water to refill my aquarium?
When you're preparing tap water, again for fresh water or salt water, you have to de-chlorinate it. Now there's a couple of methods that you can take. The simplest is just to buy an over the counter, liquid instant de-chlorinator. It literally takes the chlorine out instantly or you can aerate the water and let it sit at room temperature for a day or two and that aeration will drive off the carbon dioxide, the chloramines or ammonia that are in the water. Then it's ready to go. Now if you're talking about a salt water aquarium, you have to not only match your temperature and take the chlorine out, but you have to match the specific gravity of the salinity of your tank. There's a meter called a hydrometer that lets you measure the salt level or specific gravity within the tank. You should dump that in your tank, find out what it is, write that number down, and then when you're using your synthetic sea salt and tap water in your big bucket at home and you're mixing it up, you use that meter and mix just enough salt to get it to match up. It sounds tricky. It is tricky, because it's really hard to get those levels to match right up. You can also buy this from most stores, but they do invest in a reverse osmosis system that rips everything out of the water and then they build synthetic sea salt for you and it's pretty close to the salt level you're going to need all the time and it's real simple to do.
