Regulating my water hardness

[tolstoy21]

Cause I'm anal and get fixated on the little things, I rigged up the below to dial in the water hardness to my aquariums (to both my breeding setup and display tanks -- all are on AWC).

In the below I plumbed in a water softener cartridge with a bypass + gate valve. The gate valve allows me dial in the amount of 'hard' water that bypasses the filter.  Since installing this, my water went from around 250ppm hardness to somewhere in the range of 50ppm according to the COOP test strips. Going to test with API drop kit as soon as I get one just to have a couple different reads, then I may tweak the hardness a bit.

Why am I doing this? Well aside from being crazy and liking to tinker with things, my well water has a kind of funky makeup. Kh hovers just above 0, GH is around 250ppm-ish, and nitrates are 40ppm. I keep pretty much all soft-water species (tetras, apistos, etc) so I wanted to tinker with lowering their GH.

The recharge port shown on the right-hand side of the picture allows me to manually recharge all the resin with a brine wash, so I don't have to continually replace any of the filters which would be more of an expense than I'd ever want to incur long-term.  This basically allows me to do a  semi-automated regen-cycle.

I've been running de-nitrate filters a few years now, so the GH filter is a new addition to an existing, working system.

 

 

Edited March 16, 2022 by tolstoy21

[Hobbit]

Wow! That’s some next level stuff! How many tanks do you have?

[tolstoy21]

@Hobbit I think I have maybe 20?  It's a moving target but always going up!

Also update on this setup . . . . 

Man my water depletes the cartridges fast!  This is also why I double-stacked the de-nitrate filters. I'd hate to also have to double stack these, but alas it may be the case.

All of this is to avoid going the RO route.

I do also have an RO unit that I use for caridina shrimp, but running that for change water for a lot of tanks is much more expensive and less 'automatable' than this setup (well I haven't had to try to automate that more fully yet).

I'll probably continue to tweak this until I get the water chemistry I'm looking for, or someone sends me to the fish-keeping looney bin -- whichever happens first!

Edited March 19, 2022 by tolstoy21