What Is The Best Way To Soften My Water?

[tangokitty]

I went to the local fishstore to get a Full water test, and Ammonia, Nitrate, nitrite are all 0
Hardness is 300 Alkalinity 180 and PH 6.8

what is the best way to lower the hardness on a 50 gallon tank??

i have 8 cherry barbs, 5 bleeding heart tetras, 2 bn plecos, 6 ottos, 2 swordtails, and a red tail shark.

Any Advice would be helpful!!

 

[ALW]

You can bolil the water this can reduce the hardness of the water.

 

[Ace Of Spades]

You have 0 Nitrate , Perfection?

My water is really hard I think its like 240, but I keep african cichlids so its ok I think.....

Bogwood/Driftwood is meant to bring hardiness down?

 

[ALW]

yeh i forgot to say add some bogwood

 

[tangokitty]

How does boiling it work? I do have a few pieces of driftwood.

 

[Anguilla82]

you can get peat? stones (can't quite remember) to put in a bag in your filter that lower the hardness and pH. Though looking at your post. your pH is low already.

 

[tangokitty]

Yeah my Ph is low and I don't want it any lower, I just want the water softer. I have Co2 added that lowers the Ph, but the hardness is still there and I'd like it to be softer. What if anything do any of you know about those water softning pillows you can add to the filter. Do they work?

 

[Ludwig Venter]

Methinks that boiling the water will only add to the hardness.... i.e. the "pure" distalled water will evaporate in steam, and only the chemical "hardness" (impurities) remain. Only my logical opinion.

 

[Tolak]

Hardness is dissolved minerals in the water. You can not add something to remove this. Dissolved minerals will not evaporate through boiling, peat will lower pH, but not remove minerals, same for wood.

The only way to reliably do this is to start with ro water & reconstitute. If you mixed your tap water 50/50 with ro you would have a hardness of 150, 25% tap 75% ro would give you a hardness of 75.

Ro units are a little pricey, you could get a cheap one for a little under $100. A better option might be choosing fish that find harder water to their liking.

 

[Corleone]

My water's around 200, not as high as some people's. My solution is pretty much like Tolak suggested. Reducing it can be prohibitively expensive, so I just research my selections and go through the aquarium club to get as many locally bred fish as I can (my new angelfish were hatched just around the block from me, in fact)

 

[kribensis12]

What water is sooo hard that is dosent show up on my test kit!

 

[OldMan47]

300 ppm is a little harder than my water. Mine runs about 225 ppm. Having said that, I have not found fish yet that have a hard time living in my water. If you want to lower hardness, what you really want to do is remove dissolved solids. The only good way to do that is to mix in water that has less solids in it. As Tolak said, you can dilute the tap water with RO, RO/DI or distilled water and end up with lower solids in the final product. My own experience with doing this is it does work, as far as the measured results, but I've had to back off the RO on my community tank because some of my fish started having troubles with the low TDS water. All of the fish actually seem to do better in straight tap water even though it is somewhat hard. In my case the pH is also high so the SA fish are ending up in hard, high pH water and they still seem to do better there than the rest of the tank does with low TDS water.