house softened water… is it good for anything???

[Magnum Man78 192]

so, I mentioned this larger corner aquarium that is available to us… with my wife being ill, her friend said she would hold on to it for us, until we can take it… I already have more than a dozen tanks, so placement is challenging… one of the places it would work, is far away from either my hard well water, or my aquarium specific RO water, but it is round the corner from the kitchen, and the kitchen sink, which is currently only plumbed with house softened water…

before my RO unit, I tried using the house softened water, for soft water tanks, with poor results ( salt ions or some such ) but with the recent talk about scats, I’ve been kind of thinking a brackish tank… could the house softened water be used as a good base, for a brackish tank, or am I missing something???

 

[bgarthe78 95]

Home softeners filter out calcium and magnesium while adding lots of sodium and potassium ions which is not ideal. High sodium levels and potential unstable pH status from lowered KH makes such water not ideal for fish. Some, if not most, softeners have a bypass lever/switch one could use to gather unsoftened water and then switch back on. Do, however, test such water to be sure this bypassed water is ok for your fish. Test atm right out of the bypassed water and after it sits for 24 hours and check your chlorine and chloramine levels.

 

[GaryE38 36]

Speaking as no saltwater fish person, I find the salt side of things very careful about water. A lot of people use RO and remineralize it so they can have control over what's going in. Brackish isn't just a few tablespoons of sodium added to tapwater - it's more complex than that. This may be why when I tried brackish tanks years and ago, before I had read some of excellent forum discussions on this, I failed miserably. I thought it was just 'salt' and didn't get 'salts" with the all important S.

Really hard well water might be great for livebearers. Might. But I've heard a lot of fiasco stories from people who used kitchen softener water for fish.

 

[Magnum Man78 192]

so, this large corner aquarium needs to move in the next week or so…. I haven’t seen it, but used to belong to a gal my wife sews with, her son kept large cichlids in it, and bought a house, and there is no room for it, but sounds like it is glass, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was acrylic, by description, it’s large enough they are putting it on a pallet, and will put it in my truck with a skid loader… it’s somewhere between 75 and 150 gallons, and it’s free, if I’ll come and get it… without actually seeing it, it’s hard to imagine a place to put it, but where mrs agreed to find space for it, is still in a challenging place to service it, and an area of the house we’ll be putting new hardwood flooring in, this winter, so at minimum, it’s going to have to go in the garage, until that project is done… not much positive info on the house softened water, from the original post, but I can easily add a well water tap to the kitchen sink ( closest water source, and drain… or I could turn my RO aquarium water system, into a whole house RO… my pump for my holding tank is a diaphragm pump for house or RV water systems, and is designed to stall, so if I ran a tap to the sink, and left the system pressurized, I could have RO at the kitchen sink… I think I’d rather just have the well water at that sink, but that would really limit what could be kept in that tank, maybe bigger native fish, maybe koi??? just thinking out loud…

I was hoping in the original post, maybe brackish, would work with the house softened water and put a few monos or scats, maybe an archer fish in this tank…