Morainy you are asking some great questions on here. In my opinion I agree with what most people are saying. Vancouver has some of the best tap water in the world. I find a lot of the information we read on the internet is from the USA where not every city has great water like we do. I have read aquarium books that state the use of tap water conditioner is not needed. However I do use water conditioner on all my tanks but there is times when I forget to add it with no harm done to my fish. I will also tell you that I have bleached pieces of drift wood and some of my filter pipes in a bucket with water and bleach. I soak them for a bit than I dump out the bleach. Refill the bucket with water and aqua plus conditioner to do dechlorinize the wood and pipes. I was told this method by a LFS and was a little skeptical at first but I went ahead and tried it and sure enough no dead fish or plants. So I wouldnt be too worried about the tap water here having chlorine at high amounts that your water conditioner isnt removing it. The amount of bleach I added was way more than you would ever see in our tap water. The aqua plus had no issues declorinizing it.