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Question about snakes drinking tap water?

I've heard, but don't know how true it is, that distilled water can actually leach necessary minerals from your snakes body. I use dechlorinated tap water, and my snakes are fine.
 
As far as drinking goes for my snake i use a watering can filled with water and leave it a few days to get to room temperature and naturally dechorinate. I go through a watering can quite quickly because I have to fill my tortoise and cane toad watering bowls also. Ive never had any trouble this way. :)
 
I was just thinking the same thing (about the chloarmines)!


As for the distilled water leaching minerals...I'm not sure if that has actually been confirmed.
 
I don't know either, but I do remember somebody on one of the forums I'm on getting pretty hot about it.
 
Only two things to add.

First, as resident fish geek, I need to point out that chloramines do not dissipate if you let the water sit out and "age." Most city treatment plants use chloramines specifically for this reason- no need to use air tight water storage if they don't dissipate. So you have to use a dechloraminator (most, if not all, water conditioners remove both chlorine and chloramines) in order to make the water "safe" for fish and amphibians. My snake gets the same treated water the frogs get. I use NovAqua by Aquarium Pharmaceuticals.

Second, when I was using the schools distilled water for my tree frogs, I had insane problems with bloating- the frogs would blow up to the size of a ping pong ball, with legs. That was when I realized that because the distilled water has NO minerals or salts or dissolved solids in it, and the frogs body DOES, anytime they contacted the water, way more water than usual would cross through their semi-permeable skin to balance out the percentages. This is a standard osmosis/diffusion concept, and I, the idiot biology teacher, totally missed it at first.

Shouldn't be as bad for snakes since their skin isn't permeable like a frogs, but I would still use caution.
 
I've used, as I said before, reverse osmosis which is pretty much distilled as it doesn't have anything in it. I've had no problems with the snakes in over 3 years. They are all healthy, big and strong. I think they get a lot of their trace minerals from the mice.
 
ZooMed Repti Safe water conditioner removes cloramines, chlorine, and toxic ammonia and detoxifies nitrates. This is what we use in our tap water. Works great and we have never had a problem.
Jay & PJ :cool:
 
MegF. said:
I've used, as I said before, reverse osmosis which is pretty much distilled as it doesn't have anything in it. I've had no problems with the snakes in over 3 years. They are all healthy, big and strong. I think they get a lot of their trace minerals from the mice.
Click to expand...

RO isn't quite the same as DO, if I remember correctly. A lot of aquarium folks use RO water, but almost everyone I have spoken to on the subject shuns DO water. I will ask my chem friend for the details tomorrow and get back to you all with what he says.
 
All I know is that when the water was tested, it was 99% pure. That doesn't leave much of anything in there. The water I have now is well water and sweet and pure. It gets naturally filtered thru the sand that makes up the soil around here.
 
I posted about it on one of my fish forums.

Here are the responses.

Seems like the summation would be that toally pure water (deionized or distilled) is not great for the "mucus membrane" animals like fish and amphibians due to regulation of water balance. It's probably just fine for the snakeys though.
 
Hypancistrus said:
RO isn't quite the same as DO, if I remember correctly. A lot of aquarium folks use RO water, but almost everyone I have spoken to on the subject shuns DO water. I will ask my chem friend for the details tomorrow and get back to you all with what he says.
Click to expand...

RO water still needs to have additives put in it for fish, though. I know that Kent makes a product for this purpose. I had to use a mix of tap and RO water for my cacatuoides because my local pH is 9, and RO water does not buffer (causes mucho pH swings).

I will agree that distilled is not the way to go with fish!
 
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