I've got a question on water chemistry that has been bugging me for a while now. So at my house, we have well water. So the water is very hard. We have a water softener that uses salt that all of the water goes through. I might be wrong, and if so somebody please correct me, but I think this is how it works. Hard water runs through the water softener, sodium ions get attached to all of the minerals (through some complicated process), which makes the minerals, metals, etc. "null". When I test the gh, it comes up as 0. I have always turned a valve so the water bypasses the softener, taken a shower, and done a water change. The result was a gh of around 7 (the natural hard water is 11). The pH is always 8.2. This has worked well for almost a year now. I have only kept/bred platies, a hardy fish. But i want to get into some tougher stuff. So I was thinking of using RO mixed with equilibrium (RO suppliment). But could I just mix equilibrium with the softened water, and treat it like RO? Because the minerals and such are all null. Would the salt effect anything? Would the pH be too high? I hope somebody can answer all of this for me. Thanks!
Water softener question
- Thread starter Maxw47
- Start date
The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an interest in aquariums or fish keeping!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
The lady at the LFS said a water softener didn't make ware truly soft it was an ion exchange. We have a water softener with hard water. My kH tests at 8 which i believe is high and keeps my pH up but my gH tests at 57.3.
Not sure that helps but I've been mucking around in the water chemistry world lately.
Not sure that helps but I've been mucking around in the water chemistry world lately.
Can the fish/plants use the minerals that have the sodium ion exchange? Because if not, then I think it would be ok to just add an RO suppliment. Would the minerals with the sodium ion exchange be detrimental to fish/plants at all?
Home water softeners soften water using a technique known as "ion exchange''. This removes calcium & magnesium ions, replacing them with sodium ions. Plants can use Magnesium and calcium but don't like sodium. RO water removes minerals, etc. It doesn't exchange ions.
Last edited:
If I remember right plants do good with a KH and GH around 4, this is also a good numbers as there is still enough magnesium and calcium in the water to maintain a stable PH. Some plants do well in even softer water but I try to keep my main tank at the numbers listed. If you use water in your tank from your "house water softner" you are putting alot of sodium ions in the water and have no magnesium or calcium. Flourish is just a fertilizer and will aid plants regardless of water hardness or softness.
aqua_chem
Aquarium Advice Addict
Rivercats said:
This explanation a correct explanation of the process. Basically, it ramps up the salinity of your water, which is bad for many things freshwater. You can lower your water's "hardness" with peat in your filter, or with certain (expensive) plant substrates, but it's often not worth it.That being said, hard water is often an overblown problem. I've lived in areas with hard water, and have had reasonable success with tetras, plants, dwarf cichlids, etc.
This all begs the question though, how hard is your water?
aqua_chem
Aquarium Advice Addict
I think that would have similar side effects, just with a different ion. The TDS would be more or less the same.
aqua_chem
Aquarium Advice Addict
But I don't think that it's necessarily the sodium that's unhealthy, rather just the high TDS that comes with the high concentration of anything.
