Natural sea water vs instant sea water

"rudedog" wrote in message oups.com...
Also how long will the water be good for since I can get
about 5 to 6 buckets only. That's about 3 water changes only.

Unfiltered water straight from the sea will have a lot of live plankton
swimming in it, so if you restrict oxygen all these critters die polluting
heavily water. When you bring water for storage filter it through
several plankton collectors and put live plankton into the fish tank
for fish to eat it. Do not leave it in the storage container to rot.
Store only filtered water - as a last stage of filtering you can use fine
coffee paper filters to remove almost everything but unicellular algae.
Even these algal cells will die over time so your water will decay.
But without any filtering it would be very smelly next day already.
Give it a try.