# Well water, water softener & fish deaths



## chad320 (Mar 7, 2010)

Am RO unit will give you stable water parameters. To the point you shouldnt be testing all the time. What a giant PITA. I understand where youre coming from as our tap is so variable. RO water is pure and youll figure out what you need to reconstitute it to you own fish/plants needs and it should be constant. Just my opinion, expensive but worth it if you figure your losses with tap.


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## ghotifish (Feb 16, 2009)

Thanks Chad, your points are what we were thinking. Anyone else have any opinions?


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## Hcancino (Jun 18, 2011)

[STRIKE][/STRIKE]I have well water too and we have a kinetico water softener. I use the water straight from the tap and even use water from outside when doing major water changes and never had a problem. I dont even use a dechlorine chemical. I know the pH of our water is 8.2 out of the tap. If we don't change the filter from the water softener ever 2 months the water stars to smell like sulfur real bad. I don't know what the kH or dH is. We only have an RO unit for our drinking water. I have a DIY CO2 system and suffer from a slight BBA problem too. Here is a crappy picture of my tank right now. Also I used to have blackskirt, serpae, and bleeding heart tetras with no problems. I currently have 6 angelfish, 3 otos, 2 amanos, 1 lonely cherry shrimp, and another lonely bleeding heart tetra that I missed when I scooped up his tetra pals to trade in for my angels.


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## Geminiluna (Jul 24, 2007)

I'm in the next town over from Hcancino who posted a response above, and have well water with probably very same paramaters. We also run a water softener and I haven't had any trouble. I no longer keep a high tech planted tank but do not think I had plant issues arising from the use of well/softened water. I think any issues I had were from my lack of attention of inconsistent dosing, etc. Fish haven't been a problem either, though I never attempted to keep any super-sensitive fish. Just Cardinal Tetras, Panda Cories, etc.

So you're considering the switch to RO because of the attrition in fish and possibly caused by inconsistent water? I think RO will give you the advantage of pure water, but I think, too, that it may become susceptible to swings in parameters due to being so pure. Otherwise, people mix their RO in part with tap water to adjust the gh/kh for more stable/consistent water. But you still have to worry about aging it, measuring it, testing it, etc., so it can become more aggravating than working from the tap.

Are all your water lines running through the softener? Can you maybe route your cold water line away from the softener but still run it through a sediment filter so you can avoid the salts and the rust/iron content and see if that's more stable? Or, at least if you go for the RO, you might want to consider still using a source that hasn't gone through the softener... there are a few factors at play but generally you can assume to waste a bit of water in producing your RO and would be a shame to have so much going through your softener, and causing it to regenerate wastefully, etc.


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## GeToChKn (Apr 15, 2011)

Geminiluna said:


> So you're considering the switch to RO because of the attrition in fish and possibly caused by inconsistent water? I think RO will give you the advantage of pure water, but I think, too, that it may become susceptible to swings in parameters due to being so pure. Otherwise, people mix their RO in part with tap water to adjust the gh/kh for more stable/consistent water. But you still have to worry about aging it, measuring it, testing it, etc., so it can become more aggravating than working from the tap.



If you remineralize the RO water using the same dose each time, there is no param swings. Many people use RO water with shrimp and have no problem. You top off your tank during the week or weeks during waterchanges with pure RO water, so your params stay the same since evaporation increases gH/kH, etc, so you top off with pure RO to keep the params the same, then mix mineralized RO for waterchanges to those same params. If anything, using RO lets you keep your params exactly the same.


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## ghotifish (Feb 16, 2009)

Thanks everyone. 

Hcancino - thanks for sharing your experiences. Our water is a lower ph than yours, but the sulfur sounds similar. We don't use any dechlorinator either. You haven't found any effects on your fish with your changing water parameters (for instance if the filter is getting old and causing the sulfur smell?)

Geminiluna - afaik all our water lines are run through the softener, there is a shutoff valve that I suppose I could use, but then the water would have so much iron in it that it would be almost red. Your point about wastage and running the water softener too hard is a good one. The inconvenience of using the RO for water changes is what's stopping me now. I don't mind re-mineralizing, but having a 45 gallon trash can of water sitting around isn't very appealing at all...

Getochkn - yeah, remineralizing doesn't seem too difficult, but the storage seems like a big pain...it's pretty convenient to just hook the python to the faucet and go, have you seen any elegant solutions to this problem?

Thanks again everyone!

Carl


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## Hcancino (Jun 18, 2011)

Well to be honest I use the faucet outside for water changes. I don't really know if it goes through our water softener system. I guess I'll find this winter when the faucet outside freezes


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