Rainwater and water hardness

Bridget
  • #1
Hello am super new to fish.

The tap water at my dorm is about 180ppm and maxes out my test. I collect rain water and run it through a coffee filter and correct the PH. The GH for the rain water comes out to 75. My fish are my fish are doing *okay* with the hard water but I do feel bad, I want to lower the GH to a more acceptable level but slowly. The high range for GH is 120 which comes out to about a 50/50 mix of rain water and tap water. I know that rain water has less PH buffer and the stuff I collected was about at a 6 before I corrected it. My tap water is a pretty consistent 7 but sometimes a 7.5. I feel like this is a pretty good system, but IDK I'm still pretty new and don't know a ton about chemisty, specifically water chemistry. Is there anything that is not good about this system? Also I have a lot of PH strips and test pretty frequently and every bottle of rain water I collect but I haven't found a way to test GH for cheap. The cheapest thing I could find was a pack of 25 5 in 1 for 12$. I also have a guinea pig. My friend's guinea pig died from kidney stones and she said it was due to there being too much calcuI'm in the water he drank. Since I am already doing so much with my fish water, I figured why not get him good water to drink. How do you remove calcuI'm from drinking water?
 
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Kjeldsen
  • #2
Bridget, 180 ppm GH and 7 ph from your tap will be fine for most fish, unless you have something exotic. What you don't want to do is to keep adjusting the pH. I don't know about guinea pigs, but the rain water would have less calcium and be fine for it to drink.
 
saltwater60
  • #3
Get an reverse osmosis filter and your good to go if you’re worried about it. I don’t think it will cause you an issue though.
 
H Farnsworth
  • #4
I think you’ll be fine with your tap. Nitrogen tends to be the killer not calcium. With the exception of nitrogen, stability is greater than simulated ideal conditions.
 
Fljoe
  • #5
You really don’t have to worry about water hardness so much. Fish will adjust and be fine. If you have hard water, so does the place you buy your fish locally. I am in Florida with very hard water. You don’t want to manipulate your ph with chemicals. Your fish will adapt and be fine.
 

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