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Hopefully, some of you can put your experience to work and help me figure out what to do. I'll start off by giving you some quick background bullet points: I've kept freshwater aquariums/fish for most of my life, I'm 50. I haven't had an aquarium set-up in about 5 years and have decided to get back into it. I have a 10-gallon that I'm trying to get ready for fish, this is currently all I have room for. I live in a very small town without a fish store and I make very little money so I look for the cheapest and easiest solutions. I've never had to worry too much about water parameters in the past but they have appearently changed something with my water supply in the last 5 years. Plans: Plants: Anubias Nana, Dwarf Sagittaria, Water Wisteria Fish: Hoping to have Longfin Leopard Danios, A Chinese Hillstream Loach, and/or maybe Khuli Loaches, and/or some sort of shrimp. My set-up so far: Re-set-up on March 29, 2023 Standard 10-gallon tank with hinged glass lid HOB filter with an aquarium sponge attached to intake (have not modified this filter beyond that yet) Heater (tank tends to stay at around 78F) LED "grow" light mounted about 6-8" above tank (claims to be 2400 lumens, 6500K, and use 32 watts of power) 8.8 lbs. of Fluval Bio-Stratum plant substrate 2 Anubias Nana April 4, 2023 Added: A home-made air-powered submersed bubble filter containing a mixture of ceramic rings and crushed oyster shells (you'll understand why in my tests below), and an air pump (obviously to power the filter) Parameters and chemicals (I'm using API 5-in-1 test strips and API ammonia test strips): Baseline: Water straight from tap (no conditioner): Ammonia=~3, Nitrates=0, Nitrites= 0, GH=0, KH=0, PH=~6 Water from tap (after API water conditioner): Ammonia=0, Nitrates=0, Nitrites=0, GH=0, KH=0, PH=6.5-7 April 5, 2023 Water in aquarium: Ammonia=0, Nitrates=0, Nitrites=0, GH=30, KH=0, PH=7 April 5, 2023 Added: 1ml Fluval Gro+, 40 drops of Fritz Fishless Fuel. Ammonia tested at ~6. Added: 1/2 cup of Fritz Zyme 7 (this is the first time I've ever tried these types of products for fishless cycling) April 6, 2023: Ammonia=3-6(?), Nitrates=0, Nitrites=0, GH=60, KH=0, PH=6.5 April 7, 2023 morning: Ammonia=3-6(?), Nitrates=0, Nitrites=0, GH=60, KH=20-40(?), PH=6.5-7. Night: Ammonia=~4, Nitrates=0, Nitrites=0, GH=120, KH=60, PH=6.5. Now that my KH finally seemed to be rising and out of worry that the low KH may have killed any bacteria I re-dosed 1/2 cup of Fritz Zyme 7. April 8, 2023: Ammonia=3-4(?), Nitrates=0, Nitrites=0, GH=60, KH=40, PH=7 Summary of the problem: So as you can see my GH and especially my KH are very low and this won't do for what I'm wanting in this tank. I added the crushed oyster shells to try to raise these parameters and buffer the PH but as I said I've never had to worry about parameters much in the past so I'm completely lost on if this will work and how long it will take. Also, if I finally get the GH and KH to where I want them are they just going to crash the first time I do a water change? Let me know your thoughts and suggestions, you guys are great!