Soft tap water with high ph

[Kingfisher]

My water comes out of the tap at 8.2-8.3 ph with 37 ppm of tds, low gh and kh. My shrimp do great with just crushed coral and my panda corys don't seem to mind higher ph but I haven't been able to get my ember tetra or pygmy cory colonies to spawn much.

Would it be worth trying to lower the ph of my tap water before it goes in? & what would be easiest to use/ how should I add buffer back to the water afterwards?

[tonyjuliano]

  High PH and low hardness really is difficult to manage, it severely limits your possibilities.

This is what I would do…

Get yourself a RODI unit (there are inexpensive ones out there, like ~100 bucks), remineralize to your liking.

It sounds daunting at first, producing enough to fill an entire tank (or tanks!), but you really only have to do that once.  Once you get the mineral content you want, you just top off evaporation with straight RODI. The minerals do not evaporate off.

Of course, you’ll need more for water changes, but it’s really not hard to do.

[CT_]

Yeah,  I'm in the same boat and have done nothing about it yet.  I suspect it may have contributed to the high initial mortality rate of my cardinal tetras, but now they seem to have adapted.  If your water is that soft chances are it doesn't have a lot of buffering capacity so you can try what i've been considering.

I've considered adding crushed coral or some other carbonate source and then slowly adding acid until whatever is raising my ph is depleted and the carbonate buffers the ph instead.  But at that point I'd be messing around so much I might as well switch to RO +minerals.  If you do make any changes keep us posted.  I'd like to know how it goes.