best water

[yojoe05]

The water that we get in town can be a little rough on amphibians and fish without it being distilled and some water chemicals being used. In the case of my snake would it be best if I'm distilling the water myself to allow for evaporation of chlorine and other things?

[Chip]

How are you distilling water? Steam distilling? What is the issue with your source water? I generally say if you can drink it, you can keep a healthy aquarium with it -just pick the right fish. If it's particularly hard, it would be easier to buy spring water than distill water yourself -that's a process. If it is a matter of added chloramines, there are plenty of products for that -they all use sodium thiosulfate, AFAIK. API's Tap Water Conditioner has the best price point and is a drop per gallon concentration without aloe vera or unwanted additives.
I find distilled water, and often RO/DI water are "too" pure for ideal water for animals. The mineral content is zero, zero TDS, and the pH reads below 5 on hobby test kits. The way I figure it, clean water in the corns natural range has some mineral content, so why should it be removed entirely from their drinking water?

[yojoe05]

It was mainly the chlorine additives i was worried about because the water in our area has an unnaturally high sulfur content without the chlorine being added to defuse it. With my fish as well as my amphibians I would just fill it into a milk jug and leave it open overnight before I was going to be needing the water and that would let the chlorine diffuse. I drink the water straight from the tap and it has no problems of what I can tell beyond the fact that I know there is chlorine added to it but you can't really taste it. As far as mineral wise goes though I knew distilled was bad since it has all of it removed which can be a problem.

[Fatman608]

You need to buy your snake VOSS drinking water. LOL . Just use the water for your fish. My snakes just get water straight from the tap. I figure if I drink the water and it does not kill me then the snakes are fine also.

[Chip]

Oh, leaving water to evaporate overnight is different than "distilling it"-which typically requires something to boil in (heat is usually used to speed up the process), cooling coils for condensation, then the collected water is called distilled. Leaving water in an open container overnight isn't distillation and is not going to remove minerals, heavy metals, etc., though chlorine will dissipate from the solution. But I'm splitting hairs I suppose. If your water is safe to drink, it is almost surely safe for your reptiles to drink. 3 simple liquid test kits can tell you a lot about your water, or since you won't need it more than once, ask a local fish store what they'd charge to test the pH, KH, and GH. Heck, a call to one good local fish store would probably tell you everything you need to know about your municipal tap water.

[yojoe05]

Thanks for the information I'll talk to one of the pet stores in town and find out exactly what I'm looking at since they'll all be using the tap or bringing water in some other way most of them have done enough tests for water in town that they probably know the exact balance by heart.

[Chip]

Owning a fish store, if there's one thing I know intimately, it's our local tap water.

[HeavenHell]

I always save milk jugs which I fill at my sister's house as they are on well water.