Hard water is a fact of life for most people. Unfortunately, many aquarium owners who have hard tap water are led to believe they must go to great lengths to soften their water before they can use it in an aquarium. After waging a losing a waging battle to adjust their water parameters, some fish owners give up entirely. That doesn’t have to happen to you.Unless the fish you want to keep are the few species that absolutely require soft water to survive, there is no compelling reason to change your water at all. That’s right -- don’t change the water parameters. It’s a slippery slope that invariably leads to heartache. Truth be told, constantly vacillating water parameters, due to ongoing use of water treatment products to alter water hardness and pH, are an even bigger contributor to fish stress than if the water were left in its natural state.Don’t spit into the wind -- just accept your water the way it is, and choose fish that do well in hard water. There are plenty of them to choose from, and many are colorful and easy to care for.

Which brings me to the next point…before you give up on your favorite fish, don’t assume they absolutely must have soft water.Don’t take everything printed in your handy dandy fish atlas as gospel. Not that those books are incorrect. However, there is an important difference between the data published in the fish atlas, and what is happening in the aquarium fish industry. In the past fish were largely wild caught, but now many fish are captive bred, and they are not always bred in the exact same conditions as their native habitat.Even though the atlas accurately states the original native habitat for a species of fish, it is quite possible the fish you bring home from your local pet shop wasn’t born or raised in that environment. In fact, if your fish is one of the many species that are now commercially bred, odds are it was raised water that leans towards the hard alkaline side. As a result, many have so-called soft water species have been raised in, and become accustomed to hard water conditions.

Check with your local pet shop and find out what the hardness and pH levels are for their tanks. You may be surprised to find that most of their tanks are filled with hard, neutral to alkaline water, even though they are keeping fish that are supposedly soft water species.Why would shops keep fish in the wrong kind of water? Because the fish were captive bred in hard water conditions, and it makes sense to keep them in water that is similar to what they were raised in. Add to that the fact that city water sources are usually hard, and it is no surprise that pet shops often keep their fish in hard water.You can bypass the whole issue of whether your fish will thrive in hard water, by simply choosing a hard water species. There are plenty of species to choose from, all of which will do quite nicely in that hard water from the faucet in your house. Here are a few popular freshwater fish species that are well suited to hard water conditions. Lastly, if your chosen species of fish truly must have soft water, you may want to consider changing water sources as an option, instead of using expensive ongoing water treatments.

Reverse osmosis (R/O) water is one option, as is using a combination of tap and distilled water. Some industrious aquarium owners have been known to collect rainwater, which is naturally soft and acidic.Ultimately, your best option for success is to follow the old rule of keeping it simple. o lar das crianças peculiares personagensUse the water you have, or can easily get your hands on. the fish tank njDon’t over treat the water with lots of conditioners, and choose fish that will thrive in what you have.cheap fish tank thermometerI lost a pair of discus fish within three weeks of moving into my new apartment. fish tank siphon pets at home

The water on tap where I live is harder than discus fish can tolerate (10 dKH), and the commercial softening treatment I tried was to no avail. I would still like to keep discus fish. Is there anything I can do to reduce the hardness of my tap water?I have also noticed that water hardness tends to spontaneously increase over time. aquarium fish online in indiaWhat are the factors involved in this process? best fish tanks for goldfishDoes the accumulation of nitrates have any effect on water hardness and does pH have any effect on water hardness?The first step in addressing your problem is to clarify a number of misunderstandings about water chemistry that are widely shared by aquarists. There is a strong tendency among amateur fishkeepers to regard the concepts of hardness and total dissolved solids as effectively synonymous.

They are not, and failure to appreciate this fact can have unfortunate consequences.Hardness is a measure of water’s capacity to precipitate soap from solution. For all practical intents and purposes, hardness measures the concentration of two positively charged ions, or cations, calcium (Ca++) and magnesium (Mg++), present in solution. Water chemists and aquarists alike distinguish between carbonate or temporary hardness, a measure of the dissolved carbonate and bicarbonate salts of calcium and magnesium, which can be eliminated by boiling, and permanent hardness, so called because it measures the soap precipitating capacity of water after boiling.Which is to say, permanent hardness is a measure of dissolved magnesium sulphate. The pH of water does not have any direct effect upon its hardness, although the reverse is true. Because carbonate ion is an important buffer, water hardness is usually a good predictor of pH — typically hard water is usually quite alkaline.Total dissolved solids (TDS) is, as its name implies, a measure of all the substances dissolved in a given body of water.

Hardness obviously contributes to TDS, but as natural waters can also contain such dissolved substances as sodium chloride (NaCl) and nitrate ion, which do not contribute to their hardness, it must be regarded as simply one component of the broader measure.The confusion tends to arise in aquarists’ minds because in many natural waters, calcium carbonate and magnesium sulphate are the most abundant dissolved chemical salts. Because hardness is also very easily measured, there is a tendency to use hardness as a sort of shorthand term for TDS. The concentration of TDS in an aquarium tends to increase over time when evaporative water losses are replaced using mineralized tap water.Any calcareous material present in an aquarium also tends to go into solution over time, which also increases the total quantity of dissolved substances in solution. So, obviously, does the buildup of nitrates due to the operation of a biological filter.Aquarists like yourself, who attempt to deal with hard tap water by passing it through a commercial water softening unit, discover very quickly that hardness and TDS are most emphatically not the same thing!

Commercial water softening units, sometimes known as sodium exchange units, work by passing hard water through a chemically active clay, known as zeolite, that pulls calcium carbonate and magnesium sulphate out of solution and replaces them with sodium chloride. Water so treated no longer precipitates soap from solution, which makes it much easier to do the laundry and lather up in the shower. However, it still contains a significant amount of dissolved material.The “soft” water inhabited by such species as discus fish and cardinal tetras is not merely devoid of calcium carbonate and magnesium sulphate. It essentially lacks significant concentrations of any dissolved salts and should properly be referred to as demineralized. This is why water that has been treated by a sodium exchange unit, while perfectly soft, remains totally unsuitable for “soft” water fishes. From their perspective, commercially softened water still retains an unacceptably high concentration of dissolved minerals.

Demineralization is the only way to make your tap water discus-friendly.There are synthetic zeolites that replace all positively charged cations with the hydrogen ion (H+) and all negatively charged ions, or anions, with the hydroxyl ion (OH–). Because they must be regenerated using strong acids and bases, there is an element of hazard entailed in their upkeep that renders them unattractive to most domestic users. Happily, there is another approach to demineralizing tap water with none of the disadvantages of strong acid/base exchange resins that meets the needs of amateur aquarists.Demineralization by reverse osmosis (RO) entails pushing water through a membrane that selectively holds back all dissolved minerals. Indeed, the output of an efficiently functioning RO unit is so completely devoid of dissolved substances that fish placed in it cannot maintain a physiologically appropriate internal salt balance and soon die! For aquaristic purposes, it is thus necessary to mix RO output with a small amount of untreated tap water in order to provide the trace concentration of dissolved substances necessary to support aquatic life.

These units are readily available in a wide range of sizes, their price essentially a function of their rated output. Smaller units do not take up a great deal of space, and their installation is usually a relatively straightforward matter.RO units are not without their shortcomings. First of all, RO membranes have been manufactured to serve a wide variety of purposes. A membrane designed for the desalination of seawater is unlikely to do a good job of demineralizing freshwater. Membrane efficiency is also affected by specific dissolved substances. Knowing the chemical makeup of one’s domestic water supply is thus essential in order to select an appropriate RO unit.Secondly, their membranes tend to become more permeable to both cations and anions over the passage of time. A membrane will eventually totally lose its ability to retain dissolved minerals and have to be replaced. Its longevity is effectively a function of the mineral content of the water it is expected to treat. The higher the TDS of the incoming water, the shorter its effective life.