Aquarium water

[Allie Girl]

Hi, I have some complicated questions regarding aquarium water. 

background: 
So, lately I have been buying Crystal Geyser jugs to do water changes because our well water has 80+ nitrates and high calcium (water spots everywhere) - it gets so annoying buying mass amount of gallon jugs at the store, plus water bottles to drink too ~ so we invested in a whole house Eco Water - Water softener, Culligan water nitrate remover & carbon filter. So nitrates are removed and carbon filter to remove impurities because we have a lot of ag (livestock & fruit/veg/nut crops) so increase risk of pesticides and fertilizer leeching into the water underground, we now officially have drinkable water from the tap! Woo! 

My question is can I use this water for my aquarium? I’m worried about the water softener putting salt in my freshwater aquarium? Does anyone use a water softener for their aquarium? Do I need to add Seachem equilibrium to harden the water? 
 

- I have a cycling planted aquarium & a regular gravel aquarium with my single betta fish 

As for getting a reverse osmosis filtration a whole house costs like 20k & can’t afford that lol and we just bought our house and I’m not willing to drill a whole in our granite because it’s too all brand new. 
 

Any suggestions are helpful. This is our water on a strip

 TDS = 179 ppm

conductivity meter = 378 us/cm

[Jenja]

Growing up my home had a water purifier (aka softener) and I never truly understood why I struggled with both plants and guppies - nobody in the lfs ever pointed out that it was stripping the GH (my impression was it was about the high iron content in our well water).

Unless you are plantless and/or keeping soft water species then you're going to need to increase your GH. Most say that there's an at least one tap unconnected to the softener, or a way to bypass it - I'd probably try asking whoever installed it about bypassing it. If not the simple way would be to test an outside tap's water and see if you have one outputting the high GH water.

Personally I'd probably go for equilibrium (I do now). I can control the GH and it is helpful to the plants (some potassium in it if I remember correctly).

As for salt in the water? The salt solution recharges the resin that is taking out the calcium via ionic exchange - it's not flowing into the water supply (unless I imagine you are attempting to run water during its recharge cycles, but typically those are programmed for late at night - ours happens at 2am til approx. 4:30am every few days). I've been tempted to purchase a saltwater refractomenter (I think that's the name of the tool that measures salt in water) to confirm but never have, operating under the theory of if there was salt in the water that I'd taste it if it were enough to be harmful to my plants/fish.

[Allie Girl]

Got it. Thank you so much! Yeah I was definitely kinda freaked out because it states pulls the mg & ca and replaces with regular sodium so then I was thinking that at that point could I harm my fish by using the salty water. Perfect I just ordered equilibrium! 🙂from what I read I add it during water changes and im good to go? 

[Jenja]

Correct. How much you'll need to use depends on what GH you want to set your water at. Takes a bit of experimentation to figure out. I use 3/8th of a teaspoon per gallon to hit 8dGH (I think? I've been using that amount per gallon for so long that I've gotten foggy on the exact number). I recommend you get a liquid GH/KH test - far more economical as you figure out how much per gallon is your ideal. Then simply get a gallon jug and add a small amount of Equilibrium to it, shake the heck out of it and then test the GH. Repeat until you reach the number you want.

Once you know how much per gallon you don't need to premix water with it, simply figure out how many gallons you're adding during your water change and measure out the the Equilibrium right into the tank. It will make the water cloudy for a little bit and you'll see some land on the substrate but it'll dissolve in and clear within an hour or so.

I use gallon jugs filled 24 hours in advance, simply because they make adding water to my tank more manageable (python system isn't practical in my situation). However, if you do use a python then there's a formula I saw on a thread (apologies to whomever posted it originally, my memory sucks) that you can use to calculate - multiply WxDxH then divide by 231, of the drained area (Width and Depth are the footprint, Height is the variable you'd measure - as in you've drained 3 inches, for example).

Lastly, I see your KH is also at 0. You might want to consider crushed coral to buffer that up so your pH stays stable. Personally don't have first hand knowledge with that, hopefully someone else can chime in on that.

 

[Allie Girl]

Ok so I went and got a nerrite snail and 4 Amano shrimp. I had a growth of brown algae diatoms and hair algae so I need that taken care of. I’d say maybe I’m almost done cycling my tank? Who knows. I always test weekly and 0 ammonia and 0 nitrites, nitrates are roughly 20-40ppm from the ferts, plus ghost feeding every other day. 
 

back to my water, I fill a 5 gallon bucket of water. Prior to adding 1/2 table spoon of equilibrium readings were 0 KH & 0 GH, after adding 1/2 table spoon, it puts me 300GH & 40KH. Water is pretty cloudy, hopefully it will clear up when I do the water change tomorrow. 
 

so I was reading, does anyone use salty shrimp BEE (GH) adder. Is it better than equilibrium because I have shrimp now? 

[nabokovfan87]

Between Dosing Equilibrium, Epsom salt (magnesium), and/or crushed coral you should be able to cover water changes. Depending what you actually have to do, it might be worth getting a food safe water storage container, adding a pump head and treating it like you're running an RO system / or saltwater.

On 4/8/2022 at 7:53 PM, Allie Girl said:

back to my water, I fill a 5 gallon bucket of water. Prior to adding 1/2 table spoon of equilibrium readings were 0 KH & 0 GH, after adding 1/2 table spoon, it puts me 300GH & 40KH. Water is pretty cloudy, hopefully it will clear up when I do the water change tomorrow. 
 

so I was reading, does anyone use salty shrimp BEE (GH) adder. Is it better than equilibrium because I have shrimp now? 

the big question is what is the testing going to be after 24, 48, 72 hours. It might take time for the PH or other things to stabilize. Aerate the bucket and keep an eye on it if you can.

Considering the shrimp and snails you might just want to get plaster of paris (crushed coral) and/or get some wonder shells.

 

https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/ph-gh-kh