I live in a hard water area. For about a year I’ve run my 50l tank on filtered tap water. I’m doing partial walstad/ ecosystem so no CO2, no major water changes and lots of plants in good substrate. But the general hardness crept up to 14 deg. At which point I started to lose the odd fish ( i know may be correlation not causation). Nitrates never get over 20 or so and I feed iron in via API Leaf Zone every month or so.
I’ve since then slowly brought general hardness down to 9 over a couple of months using distilled and rainwater. I intend to try and hold it about there. pH is a flat 7 consistently.
However I now note that carbonate hardness is very low. - 1-2 drops or about 40 ppm. Aqualog is telling me this is a problem and it should be over 70, but some posts on here (I am now unable to find) have said it’s not so much a problem. What’s the consensus? I do note that snails grow slowly in the tank - generally a good thing IMO.
Mike
I’ve since then slowly brought general hardness down to 9 over a couple of months using distilled and rainwater. I intend to try and hold it about there. pH is a flat 7 consistently.
However I now note that carbonate hardness is very low. - 1-2 drops or about 40 ppm. Aqualog is telling me this is a problem and it should be over 70, but some posts on here (I am now unable to find) have said it’s not so much a problem. What’s the consensus? I do note that snails grow slowly in the tank - generally a good thing IMO.
Mike