3 day weekend away disaster HELP

Hope this works this from water authority for my tap. We are on man made lake so run off high pH low minerals and hardness.
 

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Hope this works this from water authority for my tap. We are on man made lake so run off high pH low minerals and hardness.
Basically I can reformulate this water or distilled. Frankly it might be cheaper to do distilled water. As I need to lower pH with tap just give it alkaline.
 
That's quite a good report, it has almost everything the aquarist needs to know. [The main things missing are ammonia,nitrite and nitrate, all of which may be present though fortunately not usually, but you can test the tap water for these with our aquarium test kits.]

You have soft water, so forget livebearers. The total hardness at an average of 109 ppm (= 6 dGH) is much too soft. You are ideally suited to soft water fish.

As for the pH, the Alkalinity (this is the carbonate hardness) at average 66 ppm (= 3-4 dKH) is not going to buffer pH very much, so my suggestion here would be to dilute the initial aquarium water with pure water (distilled, or clean rainwater works even better). This will stabilize things, and future water changes will be safe. But it would also be good to find out if the water authority is adding something to raise the pH. I would suspect this as so high a pH with so low a GH/KH is unlikely in natural waters, though not unheard of.
 
The problem I see with mixing distilled water with the tap is I will cut what little minerals I have in half again. With our water shed being rain run off already that's the cause of low mineral count to begin with. In the hear of Illinois the bread basket... nothing but top soil and flatness. I think my best thing to do is figure out my 5 gallon bucket formula based on distilled water. If read other that do this and distilled water is rather cheap in farming country.
 
You can add minerals to RO / distilled water. You can get this from LFS.

At least that's what I figure as LFS do provide remineralised RO water for those salty tank folks....
 
The problem I see with mixing distilled water with the tap is I will cut what little minerals I have in half again. With our water shed being rain run off already that's the cause of low mineral count to begin with. In the hear of Illinois the bread basket... nothing but top soil and flatness. I think my best thing to do is figure out my 5 gallon bucket formula based on distilled water. If read other that do this and distilled water is rather cheap in farming country.

I strongly recommend that you first find out just what is being done to the water to raise the pH. Data on your water authority's site should indicate this. It is usually not safe to "assume" this or that, and go down a road that is not necessary.

For example, my water here in the SW of BC (and same holds for NW USA) is very soft, near zero GH and KH. The pH is correspondingly low, down below 6 naturally. To avoid corrosion of the pipes the water authority in Greater Vancouver add soda ash (sodium carbonate) to bring the pH up to around 7. This dissipates out of the water relatively easily, and my various aquaria have a stable pH that varies depending upon the setup, but none of them are above the mid 6's. My point is, that you need to find out what if anything is being added to cause a high pH, before considering ways to deal with it.

Byrn.
 

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