New fishkeeper

[Essjay]

Rainwater is fine - having a butt is best so there's always some to hand rather than risk it not raining for a while.

Driftwood etc won't do much with the hardness of your water, it's just too hard for wood to make much of a change. South east England is well known for water that's almost liquid rock!

There are fish which do well in very hard water, though having soft-ish water myself I'll leave suggestions to those who have hard water.
One thing you need to be aware of is ammonia. This is excreted by fish and it exists in two forms in water - toxic ammonia and much less toxic ammonium. Both exist at the same time and the amount in each form depends on temperature and pH. At high pH more is in the toxic form. Our test kits measure both forms combined and at high pH more of the tester reading will be in the toxic form. Hard water usually goes with high pH. With fish-in cycling there's always some ammonia until enough bacteria grow which is why with high pH it is more important to do a fishless cycle rather than fish-in.

 

[Honeybear]

Rainwater is fine - having a butt is best so there's always some to hand rather than risk it not raining for a while.

Driftwood etc won't do much with the hardness of your water, it's just too hard for wood to make much of a change. South east England is well known for water that's almost liquid rock!

There are fish which do well in very hard water, though having soft-ish water myself I'll leave suggestions to those who have hard water.
One thing you need to be aware of is ammonia. This is excreted by fish and it exists in two forms in water - toxic ammonia and much less toxic ammonium. Both exist at the same time and the amount in each form depends on temperature and pH. At high pH more is in the toxic form. Our test kits measure both forms combined and at high pH more of the tester reading will be in the toxic form. Hard water usually goes with high pH. With fish-in cycling there's always some ammonia until enough bacteria grow which is why with high pH it is more important to do a fishless cycle rather than fish-in.

Thanks Essjay. I will do a fishless cycle first before I add any fish

 

[Honeybear]

Thanks Essjay. I will do a fishless cycle first before I add any fish

Are there additives and such that will help with hard water etc

 

[CaptainBarnicles]

Are there additives and such that will help with hard water etc

Not particularly, nothing that will make a dramatic difference to the hard water we have anyway. Your best bet is rain or RO water

 

[Honeybear]

Not particularly, nothing that will make a dramatic difference to the hard water we have anyway. Your best bet is rain or RO water

Ok. I have a waterbutt that I can use.

 

[emeraldking]

Hi & welcome to our forum...
A number of good advice has been given to you by other members. Hope you'll listen to them...

 

[Honeybear]

Ok. I have a waterbutt that I can use.

I have just moved so I didn't know what my waterbutt water was like. Just poured some into a cup. Not the cleanest plus I seems to have some little red worms in it. May have to use some sort of filter on it.

 

[CaptainBarnicles]

Your little red worms will make good fish food

 

[Sparx]

I have not received my tank yet. Bought it from maidenhead aquatics. Will recieve it in about a week. Kind of know the basics. I am to use plants and substrate, driftwood etc. I heard that can help with water hardness. I have done plenty of googling and have found out that some species of tetra and cloud minnows can handle hard water and danios. So that is encouraging. Have not read up about rainbow fish so thanks for that. My dad lives in reading and he has tetras. He uses rain water from his water butt for his water changes.

I got my tank and most of my fish from Maidenhead Aquatics. Very nice and knowledgable bunch there, I’ve got one quite local to me
What tank did you go for?

Edit: I downloaded the Maidenhead Aquatic App called Fishkeeper and it gives you details on species and what water parameters are best for them.
According the the app, Out of the fish I keep, the following don’t mind up to 20 dh:
Gouramis
Bristlenose Pleco
Cherry Barb
Synodontis catfish up to 25 dh
Reed fish
Scissortail Rasbora
Mollys up to 25 dh

There are loads of species on there you can look up

 

[Honeybear]

I got my tank and most of my fish from Maidenhead Aquatics. Very nice and knowledgable bunch there, I’ve got one quite local to me
What tank did you go for?

Edit: I downloaded the Maidenhead Aquatic App called Fishkeeper and it gives you details on species and what water parameters are best for them.
According the the app, Out of the fish I keep, the following don’t mind up to 20 dh:
Gouramis
Bristlenose Pleco
Cherry Barb
Synodontis catfish up to 25 dh
Reed fish
Scissortail Rasbora
Mollys up to 25 dh

There are loads of species on there you can look up

Hi sparx. I bought a fluval Roma 200litre. Come with everything needed to get up and running. I think I have a maidenhead aquatics in Braintree. About 30 mins from me. Maybe I should go visit them.

 

[Sparx]

Good choice, that’s a good tank. Definitely check out their app aswell

 

[Honeybear]

Your little red worms will make good fish food

Cool. I suppose the tank filter will do the rest

 

[Trav0]

my advice if you really want to keep a community tank and don't like the advice of keeping it to 1 kind maybe find the middle ground of only a few species, and in my opinion you can alway add a pleco or something like it without to much trouble but you mentioned gouramis.... in my experience they are to aggressive to put with many of the tetra varieties..
if my thinking is way off feel free to correct me someone

​

 

[Magnos]

Test your tap water too. My tap water comes with 1ppm of amonia . Once I bought an rodi unit my tanks now cycle in half the time and PH is way more stable.
My advice on community tanks... you can always shove more fish. But how many water changes do you want to have to do. In a new aquarium. Immediately adding all the fish you want is just going to make amonia and nitrite spikes so frequent you'd be doing daily water changes. I would get a school of one kind of fish once you are cycled. I find Once I have a tank running for about 2 months then I can start really stocking it.

 

[Essjay]

Fishless cycling with ammonia means that most of the fish can be added as soon as the tank is cycled. In fact not fully stocking the tank at the end of a fishless cycle means losing a lot of the bacteria that have been grown over the few weeks of the cycle. It's fish-in cycling where you have to add fish a few at a time and do lots of water changes. Fishless cycling is a lot safe for fish and easier for the fishkeeper.


Ammonia in tap water usually means the water provider uses chloramine as a disinfectant rather than chlorine. Many water conditioners have an ammonia detoxifier added for this reason, they detoxify the ammonia from chloramine temporarily until the filter bacteria have had time to remove it.