Hard Water

What is a good way to soften water if you have extra hard water?

several different ways. Depending on how serious you are...

Adelaide, where I live, has up there with the worst tap water in the world. In fact, international ships will not fill their water tanks here as it will scale up the pipes. So, for people like myself who want to keep amazonian fish who like soft water we have a massive challenge.

So, the cheap way is to add acids to the water. This will lower the pH and the acid in the water will attack the carbonates in the water and lower the hardness (depending on the acid you use). Some of them also use phosphates to lower it, which will promote algae growth.

The next way is to use wood or peat to add acids to the water. This is a much more natural way of doing it. This is how the water in the amazonian basin is low in pH. again, the the acids attacks the carbonates and lowers the hardness as well. it also adds tannins to the water which some people like, giving that tea colored effect.

The best way is to actually filter the water. I mean, when you consider it, hardness is basically stuff dissolved into the water. All of the other ways of trying to lower it are adding thing to the water, which is very counter intuitive. I use a reverse osmosis filter system. I strips out all of the salts and other nasty stuff that the amazonian fish don't like. It take the hardness from about 7-8 degrees to less than one, and drops the pH from 8.2 to about 6.5 which is great. I do then add in some stuff to bring the hardness and pH up otherwise the pH bottoms out to 4.5 with the tannins and humic acid from driftwood.

I didnt have this problem before cause we always had a water softener, but i just moved to my moms and she has Well water and no softener. I just noticed it when I started haveing fish die and never had that before. So I checked all the waters in my tanks and they were off the charts. so I did particals on them all with water from an artisian Well we have close by that tested more in the areas I need for my fish and it all dropped concideribly. now I am just waiting to see how the fish react.

I am always very careful when using ground water. Sometimes it can be a very double edged sword. Some are very salty and can contain nasty pathogens.

I would be testing the water a lot before using it. For me, it is either rainwater or tap water. Any other water should be at least filtered before use.

see my moms well does have a good filter on it but is really not the best well. The artisian well we have down the road tests better than any city tap water I have ever used. all our roofs here are shingled with tar shingles so I really dont have a safe roof to collect rain water from.