treehugr

I saw this stuff on a couple of Websites and was wondering if you all would recommend or discourage it's use...

Kent Freshwater Essential
Color and vigor of fish can be negatively affected by lack of trace minerals. Kent Freshwater Essential replaces biologically important trace minerals which are used by fish and plants and removed through filtration in freshwater aquariums.

Sounds like it would be good for the fish, especially since the filters that are made for our tank (Biocube) have carbon in them.

Any experience with this type of product - good or bad?

Gargoyle

My honest thoughts....

Snake oil...

treehugr

Really? So I don't need to add anything to keep the fish healthy and happy? Just feed them and do water changes weekly?

Gargoyle

Thats what I would do... I don't believe in the "add every week" or "add after every water change" idea unless its fertilizers for plants.

A high quality food would do more for them than adding "trace minerals" to the water for "fish health" IMO.

Jim

Kent has good products, I use their Discus essentials. But then again I agree with Gargoyle, unless you're using a R/O filter or purified water, (which I use) I don't see any real reason for having to add minerals unless you start to see a problem with the fish.
Remember the old saying:
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

angelfish220

you can take the carbon out of your filters, this is better for your fish.

Jim

true, I almost never use carbon, it leaches all the nutriants my plants need. I only run a carbon filter pad every couple months or so to remove any toxins that might have developed. Even then I only run it a day or so, then take it back out.

Gunnie

I agree. Unless you are using RO water your tap should add back in the nutrients used by your plants and fish when you do water changes.

treehugr

Okay, was is "RO" water? I know, my newbieness is showing

Also, I wasn't aware I could use straight tap water. I guess you just add that "Prime" to it to take out the bad stuff, right? Is it totally safe after that? I'm always leery about tap water.

We've used spring water before but, that could get expensive. If we could use tap that would be great, I'm just worried it's too hard in our area. Also, we get some funky pink/orange residue in our bathtub and dog water dish (I'm assuming it's rust) so not sure that our tap would be a good idea. We've been getting the water from Big Al's (.39/gallon).

Jim

First, all of us here started out as a "newbie", and I was probably one of the worst, so don't sweat it! lol.
R/O water is short for Reverse Osmosis. It's a type of filter that super cleans the water to the point of no minerals or anything at all left. In fact, if I understand it correctly, it's almost TOO clean for fish, and you have to add some trace minerals, etc... back to the water to make it safe for the fish and plants (if you have them)
As for your water, you're going thru the same thing I did. Our tap water here is near toxic, so what I ended up doing is going to Publix (local supermart) and buying a gallon of all the diffferent bottled water they had, took them home and tested them all for pH, hardness, etc.
Turns out that the plain Publix Purified water was very soft and slightly acidic, just like an Amazon tank, and has been perfect for water changes.
I don't know about where you are, but the spring water I tested was very hard, and it may be these disolved minerals you're seeing as the "funky pink/orange residue". I would test it for hardness and iron (if you can find a decient Iron test kit). I'm betting it's pretty high.

Gunnie

Unless you have super bad tap water, your fish should be just fine. You will have to acclimate them slowly to your tap water though since you have been using special water which may have a dramatically different ph than what you have been using. Most of the time, your fish can adapt very well to most ph levels in tap water. Wild caught fish have a harder time adjusting than locally bred fish. I'm not sure about the rust, but the water conditioners available are used mainly for chlorine and chloramines in municipal tap water. Some conditioners also deal with metals in the water, and that may what you would need in your conditioner to deal with that rust. Definately use Prime or some other conditioner each time you add water from your tap to your tank if you have city water. You can find out if your water also contains chloramines, or simply buy a conditioner that treats both. The RO water is reverse osmosis which is a process that takes all the minerals out of the water, so you have to add them back in when using the water for fish.

Jim

I agree with Gunnie. My tap water here in this part of Florida is crap, and so full of Chlorimines it's almost toxic. Plus it's super hard (500+ ppm). So I don't mind spending the extra few $$$ for good water. But that's here, not there. I would test your tap water if I were you before buying all your water.

treehugr

How do I test the water? I can test it with the API kit for PH and the like, but how do I test for the rust/metals and other stuff?

treehugr

Is RO water the stuff they sell at the LFS??

Jim

You can get kits to test for Iron and copper and I think phosphates, but that's overkill I think. The 2 things I would test for are gH and kH, or General Hardness (amount of total disolved minerals) and Carbonate Hardness (the amount of disolved carbonates, which are also your pH buffers). The kH is not as important right now, but you do want it reasonably low or you'll never get your pH to raise or lower. But if your gH or general hardness is high, as I suspect it will be, then you can definitly count on lots of disolved minerals, including probably the iron/rust you're seeing.

treehugr

Okay, I'll see if my LFS has those kits. Making a trip out there shortly. Thanks.

Jim

You can usually get tests for gH and kH on multi-strips.

treehugr

Well, my LFS had the two tests but I didn't get them. My husband had a good point: "What do we do if the tests show the tap water isn't great? then we just wasted $12 on a test we used once." So, we just bought some water from the LFS like we normally do.