Adding Still Bottled Water

[Bignose]

J4ames has been misinformed at least a little bit. Corydoras catfish are from the Amazonian basin, very soft, very acidic water. There are a few rivers that have some hardness, some alkalinity, but all-in-all the Amazonian basin is soft, acidic. Plecos are from the same water. Platys and guppies are generally from harder water, but they are so bred today that they are pretty adaptable. Mollies are the common livebearer that still really requires significantly harder water to really thrive. Guppies and Platys are pretty happy in almost anything today. Just follow the rules for all fish -- i.e. keeping the water stats, pH, temp, hardness, as constant as possible and you will be fine.

 

[Invader Xan]

I've used bottled water for sick shrimp before. Perked them right up. Check the label though -- it should tell you the mineral content and give a stat called Dry Residue. Just avoid anything containing chlorine or a dry residue too much higher than 250mg/litre and it should be just fine!

If it doesn't say, it probably safest to avoid.

 

[J4MES]

J4ames has been misinformed at least a little bit. Corydoras catfish are from the Amazonian basin, very soft, very acidic water. There are a few rivers that have some hardness, some alkalinity, but all-in-all the Amazonian basin is soft, acidic. Plecos are from the same water. Platys and guppies are generally from harder water, but they are so bred today that they are pretty adaptable. Mollies are the common livebearer that still really requires significantly harder water to really thrive. Guppies and Platys are pretty happy in almost anything today. Just follow the rules for all fish -- i.e. keeping the water stats, pH, temp, hardness, as constant as possible and you will be fine.

Im just going by what david alderton says:

Platy, medium hard(as you have said pretty adaptable)
Guppys, Medium hard
Corys:medium hard
coolie loach:soft
tetras soft

If you want to argue with an expert with him that is fine.

J4MES

 

[vinylman]

To the OP; I really wouldn't worry about the amount of oxygen in your tank unless the fish are continually gasping at the surface. Any tank with half-decent filtration will be well oxygenated. You could always use more plants (my favourite stock answer!).

 

[Bignose]

J4ames, tetras and corydoras catfish come from the exact same rivers and streams in the Amazonian basin, why would their water requirements be different? Don't just go by what I or any other expert says, think about this yourself, and try to answer that question I asked...

 

[fry_lover]

"corys prefer harder water"

LOL to that, they can be fine in harder water sure, but how can they possible prefer harder water when thats not their natural habitat? LOL to that

 

[mark.w.jones]

Prefer is an interesting word to use. A wild fish, caught out of the amazon would obviously prefer to be put into a tank with similarly soft water. Would the same fish, captive bred for year after year in a warehouse, with much harder water than they have in the wild want to go into a soft tank? Or something similar to the hard conditions in which they were bred? I can't say I am a breeding expert but I'm sure a lot of breeders don't bother toying with the exact hardness of water to perfectly match all of their species natural habitat. I may of course be wrong

 

[tmack]

I don't think this is quite the same as the bottled water being discussed here, but it's similar. About 2 years ago I set up a small tank in my office at work, and one of the guys I work with did the same. Same tanks, similar setups. My fish thrived and he had continual problems with keeping his alive. He'd buy fish and they'd always end up sick and dyeing after only a day or two. We compared what we each did with our tanks and eliminated, one by one, what he had done differently than me. We eliminated things like the fabric type plants he had, in favor of plastic plants like I was using, compared tank temperatures, etc., etc. By the time we got done we ran out of things to try until I thought of the actual water itself.

I had been using dechlorinated tap water and I found he had been using the bottled water from the office water coolers. These are the ones with the big water bottles that you turn upside down and set into the base unit. As soon as he went to using tap water his fish started thriving. The only thing I could think of was that the water in those big bottles used in the water coolers was treated with something - maybe algaecide or biocide to keep the water clean? Maybe it was chlorinated? Maybe it had too much or too little mineral content? We couldn't tell from the label. Whatever it was there was obviously something about that office cooler bottled water that it would not support fish life. It wasn't pH or hardness, it was something else that we couldn't determine via simple tests in the lab we have on site. I doubt if this is true with all bottled water, but it's one more thing to consider when you get stumped trying to solve a problem.