Fish stores and GH

[gwand]

Most fish stores sell fish that live in various degrees of water hardness. Do you think that the majority of fish stores individualize the hardness of the water for a particular species’ needs or do you think as a matter of convenience all of their fish are housed in water from the same water source?

 

[Magnum Man]

I think almost all use the same water for all their tanks... some very few may have a few banks of tanks with differing water depending on size, volume of sales, variety of fish, and if the own, and their crew could maintain differences... I think if they are doing well, they'll have some sort of filter, deionizer, RO, ect., if needed some stores may be in a natural area, of their tap water source being somewhat neutral, or just may rely on selling fast, or only stocking fish that tolerate their water

 

[Colin_T]

We used to in several of the shops I worked at back in the 90s. One of the shops had about 12 rows of tanks and 1 row was salt water. There were 4? that were livebearer, and Rift Lake cichlids, they had mineral salts added to them when water changes were done. The remaining tanks were just dechlorinated tap water, which had virtually no GH and a pH around 8.0, but we dropped that when we did water changes. There were big holding pits that held the water and we drained and refilled them for water changes, then adjusted the chemistry before turning the pump on and letting the water circulate.

At another store I was in I used mineral salts to buffer the pH, GH and KH of the livebearers, Rift Lake cichlids and goldfish tanks. The remaining tanks were soft water and contained tetras, barbs, gouramis and most of the other types of fish commonly sold.

Some of the shops here have limestone in their tanks to buffer the pH and help increase the GH and KH a little bit, but it only increases it a bit. Other shops add mineral salts to their Rift Lake tanks.