Water preparation

[Maurice Matla]

So how do you guy´s prepare your water ?

That would be a whole new art for me to master since i have alway´s been able to use water straight from the tap where i live for the kind of aquariumkeeping i have been doing.

I live in the midle of the most densly populated part of The Netherlands and relativly close to one of the largest ports in the world (Rotterdam) with all its asociated heavy industry. Rainwater i do not feel comfterble about using.

But RO is availible at 2 or 2,5 Euro/100 Ltr. A decent option when you first start out with 2 or 3 tanks.

But what do you guy´s do to prepare it further ?

[Pavel Chaloupka]

It is not that hard as preparing some medium type waters where you need stable paramaters.
You need very low conductivity water with very low pH (around 5) and plenty of humic substances. The easiest method is to filter or drop RO water over peat. You may buy no additives pure peat in gardening shop, no need to spend fortunes on aquarium peats, just make sure it is realy pure peat. I bought a 30 liters bag years ago and I still use it. I have raised and kept quite many fish using it and never spoted any problems compared to aqaurium products. I think it is just the companies that produce aqaurium stuff that want people to be scared to use normal peat. It may couse problems in normal tanks as it is not washed and sometimes very acidic, but you can not hurt Paros this way 😀 Dependent on the quality of the RO water you may or may not add some very little amount of harder water, I add tap water to like 10µ which is close to the conductivity on many natural localities. This is only needed in new tanks as some ions get in with feeding later, so you may continue with pure RO after some time in most cases. When using the peat, you even get rid of most of the added kations becouse the peat (or more precisely humic acids) is able to exchange kations for H+ which creates H30+ (hydrated form present in water) that is responsible for the acidity of the water as such. You may use anorganic acids for lowering the pH too as it is done in normal aquariums, but when you have peat or alder cones, it is just fine and you have humic substances added without any further needs. As I started to think much more about ecology when I became a member here and did not want to use peat in large amounts anymore, I prepare my water like this: (reciepe for 10 liters) 1 liter alder cone extract (let infuse big handful of alder cones in 1 liter RO water for a week) 1 liter Ketapang extract (Terminalia catapa leaves extract prepared the same way as previous, if you want to use it make sure to order the real stuff from Asia, brown red and honey smell, sometimes they sell almost green leaves collected right from the trees and that is just useless) and 1 ml of Aquahum (artificialy prepared solution of 50:50 humic and fulvic acids made by humidifying celulose leftovers after paper production under laboratory conditions) ad RO water to the amount of 10 liters. Of course you do not have to make such semilabarotary tricks and you may use just peat and add beech leaves in to the tank. It works fine, just be aware that soft and acidic is not enough, you need to use humic substances too.

[Maurice Matla]

Thank you for your clear explanation.

I live a few minute´swalk from a garden center so that shouldnot be a problemat all. And in the park just around the corner i can get all the aldercones ,beech and oak leaves i can ever dream off.
So alland allit seems very doable.

[Dorothee Jöllenbeck-Pfeffel]

Hi Pavel,
very fine to the point explanation! And I myself was astonished, how relatively easy the Paro water can be prepared – and develops itself in the tank!

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