FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

I’m from Portland, OR and I’ve been growing Carnivorous plants using tap water for a bit now. I’m very curious to know if there are other places in the US where the tap water is pure enough for Carnivorous Plants straight from tap. Anyone know?

It's hard to tell without a TDS meter. I used to buy distilled water by the gallon, but then switched to filling up a 5 gallon jug at Primo water stations which cut my water expenses in half. I think I'm going to switch again to using a zero water filter since its guaranteed to be 0 ppm. It comes with a free TDS meter and you only have to replace the filter every 4 months or so, which would really save money for anyone that can't use tap water (I don't want to take the risk). According to the book Savage Gardens, the ppm needs to be lower than 100 before the amount of chloride stuns the plants.

that doesn’t answer what i asked lol

Have you seen this thread? There's a bunch of folks with low ppm water.
tds-total-dissolved-solids-of-water-in- ... t3788.html

thenewwwguy wrote:that doesn’t answer what i asked lol

I kind of implied that you were asking for an alternative to tap.

oh no i wasn’t, i was asking what other watersheds have plant-ready water straight out of the tap.

thenewwwguy wrote:oh no i wasn’t, i was asking what other watersheds have plant-ready water straight out of the tap.

I think the San Francisco might. Generally speaking, cities that use surface water as opposed to groundwater have lower TDS.

Some surface watersheds have lower TDS than others — for instance, San Francisco get their water from a lake on the Tuolumne river, which is fed by snowmelt and mostly flows over granite. Meanwhile, my tap water comes from a lake on the (Texas) Colorado river, which is fed by rainfall and artesian springs and mostly flows over limestone. Limestone dissolves in water easily, so my tap water is somewhat hard. Granite doesn’t, so San Francisco has fairly soft tap water.

That’s good to know. Thanks