Advice needed

[Kevin78]

Good evening all!!

New to the forum and a beginner to the aquarium world. I've had aquariums in my family growing up and bought a small 2 gal tank a few years back for my kid but now we want to upgrade. I have a large spot in my basement family room that could use a nice aquarium in its place. I would like to go with a 50-75gal tank. My first question is I have a water softener installed in my house to help combat our towns hard water. Would the softened water pose a problem for the fish? I don't want to set everything up then find out I have a major problem after the fact. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Kevin

 

[charliebankston]

Go with the 75, better options, and you won't regret not getting the bigger one later, lol. Most S. And central American fish like softer water. You'll just have to research what fish you like and see what is compatible with your tested Ph

 

[Kevin78]

Thank you!!

I was wondering if taking my tap water to a fish store, if they could test it and let me know what will work and what won't. I do have the API freshwater master test kit but not sure if that will tell me the info needed about how sustainable my tapwater is.

 

[Kevin78]

I just finished up testing my tap water. I followed the directions to the letter. Here is what I got

PH 7.2
High PH 7.4
Ammonia 0
NI 0
NA 5.0 (It could be 5 or 10 depending on the light and the angle. Its frustrating that it's never cut and dry). I took a pic and it's saved to my google photos, just not sure how to post it here.

The only thing I cannot test is the water hardness/softness.

 

[charliebankston]

Those numbers look pretty good imo, I keep lots of different types of cichlids in my tap water which is about 7.6 and they do fine. I'm not trying to breed any, so the harder water is not an issue. I think you could keep whatever you wanted in that

 

[Kevin78]

Awesome news!!
Thank you for replying!!

Kevin

 

[Kevin78]

I used the 5 in 1 test strips just now to test the following
General Hardness- 0
Carbonate Hardness- 80 or 120, its hard to tell.

 

[charliebankston]

Yeah, that's pretty soft water. New world cichlids will do well in that

 

[Kevin78]

Any idea which fish would thrive in water like that?

 

[charliebankston]

If you did the 75g, angelfish, severum, acara, geophagus. Depending on the species, and other stocking, would determine how many of those you could keep etc.

 

[charliebankston]

If you did cichlids only, convicts, fire mouth, jack dempsey would work. No female convict tho, spawning makes them very mean. Female convicts have red on the belly, males don't

 

[Kevin78]

That's a good list, thanks!!

 

[charliebankston]

Yw! Good luck!

 

[Kevin78]

Thank you!!