Water Quality?

[bobblehead27]

So I have been struggling to keep anything alive in my tank for over a year. I've had numerous apisto's and dwarf pikes and SAP's and most fish died immediately following a water change... it took me a while to put two and two together because most of the time they'd get sick and I'd end up doing another water change to help them and another.
I eventually came to realize my water was probably the issue (having always had great water everywhere else I've lived, that didn't come to mind). I figured the low chlorine levels in the water had to be the issue. As a result, I started adding prime to the water. That definitely helped, but the fish would still start to look sickly and the plants would look like crap afterwards, and slowly regain their health as time goes on. I'm thinking this is because something in the water is causing issues and dissipating allowing them to recover... attached is the water companies report on the water... do you think I'm right?
My job also has an industrial water distiller at it's disposal that I could use. Should I just start filling up water from there and using it to do all my water changes? That would probably save me a huge headache...

 

[cichlidfish]

What about your ammonia and nitrite? I would check that. I don't think chlorine would kill that quickly.
Also your ph isn't ideal for those species.

 

[duanes]

I don't see anything out of the ordinary in any of the parameters in that report except that, your water is extremely soft, basically mineral free, and has a low alkalinity (calcium).
The low alkalinity means that fish urine can easily overwhelm your tanks unless you do very frequent water changes to keep pH from dropping, or...
add a supplement like baking soda with each water change, or use crushed coral substrate and in filters to help keep fish urine from crashing the pH, and keep water parameters stable.
I would also only try to keep soft water species like the ones mentioned, nothing from Central America, or the rift lakes of Africa.
But even with soft water species, if you wait a week between water changes with such low alkalinity, the pH in the tank will have crashed beyond what fish may find healthy because low alkalinity water has little buffering capacity to buffer fish urine.
Adding a fluidized bed reactor with aragonite as media could help to add buffering capacity.
If that was may tap water, I'd be doing a 40-50% water change every other day to prevent pH crash, use coral as substrate, and.....add the fluidized bed reactor.

 

[Coryloach]

I am seeing a couple of issues there. Copper is quite high at 0.354mg/l and also iron at 0.76mg/l. In soft water like that these could potentially be toxic long term. I'd add a bunch of floating and emersed plants to that tank, not submersed. They'll use up those as micro nutrients quite efficiently. You could also look into copper removal media of some sort. There is also some unnamed disinfectant being used in the water...who knows what that is...

Additionally, what Duanes said about increasing the hardness of the water a bit by having coral in the substrate or filter, to also prevent potential PH/KH crashes which could be a prime or additional issue. You could also look into an RO unit, not to make your water any softer but to purify it from those unwanted metals. The iron manageable, plenty of plant species that love to consume iron, and I have the exact opposite problem, no iron for my plants, but the copper is a potential issue. Try keeping some cherry shrimp in a small cycled tank....my guess is they won't last...

Here is a bit of info on copper...Lower concentrations than those in your tap are used in some disease treatments....So your fish are immersed in antiparastici copper med for the last year...They're surely not dying of parasites

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fa165

Use Prime at water change. Read the label and dose enough to remove the stated level of copper in your water report, and see how that goes for a start....If you could magically remove the copper, reduce the iron a bit and the "disinfectant", you'd have great water

 

[bobblehead27]

So should I just take the distilled water from my work? I also don't understand why when I test the water it says my pH is through the roof. It's above 8 even with driftwood plants and coconut shells in the tank My fish do better days after a water change. I have tons of plants including pothos reducing the ammonia and nitrates levels to unreadable levels. I currently haven't done any water changes in weeks and the fish and plants are back to thriving. I currently have an ebjd, an apisto agassizi and a ton of rams and they're all doing great.

My cherry shrimp lasted months before my fish are them. One of my fish had died from some sort of parasite (white stringy poo and sunken stomach) and mts are running rampant. I'm thinking this report isn't accurate.

 

[duanes]

I used to generate these kind of reports when I worked for a drinking water facility as a chemist/microbiologist. The penalties for trumping up false numbers were quite severe, and no one where I worked was paid enough to take that kind of chance, or saw any need to.
Drinking water is produced to be healthy for human consumptions, and the disinfection process is often not good for fish, and comes into conflict with fish keepers. This is the reason we aquarists must neutralize disinfection residual before or during every water change.
In the lab we used pH electrodes that were much more sophisticated than any aquarium test gear, and had to do blind standard testing during each test, and quality assurance competency testing several times per year.
There were many times when I would be called to residents homes (because I was the fish guy), where the customer was saying we had killed their fish. After testing I usually found the aquarist was either not treating for chlorine or chloramine (which is required by law to provide safe for "human" comsiption water. Or the customer ws using proper aseptic technique while doing a test, allowing some stressful situation in the tanks, or the customer was not quarantining new fish, or any number of other problems.
Stringy feces and sunken guts are usually a sign of a bacterial infection, brought on by stress, or not quarantining new stock. And it can sometimes take a month or more for symptoms of something like that infection to show up.

 

[ryansmith83]

Can you test your pH directly from the tap, then test the pH of water that is aged and aerated for 12 hours in a bucket?

Sometimes pH shifts as tap water off-gasses. If you are doing water changes directly from the tap without aging, my guess is that you're drastically altering your tank pH causing pH shock among your fish, then they remain stressed as it swings again for 12 - 24 hours.

The best way to know for sure is testing water immediately from the tap and water after aerating overnight. Use a bucket rather than the tank to eliminate other variables.

 

[bobblehead27]

Ok thanks guys.

 

[duanes]

One thing about water quality.
A water plant can only do so much with the water that comes in.
If the politicians, have loosened or eliminated water quality regulations that keep water from becoming polluted or contaminated, that could be a problem. Best available technology can't protect us from much of the chemicals out there, if dumped into our natural water, our water supply.
If you take what happened in Flint, when politicians cut the budget for what was needed to purify the incoming water, everybody's health was at risk.
And lately politicians seem to think it's Ok to deregulate and gut the Clean Water Act and rules that have kept our water safe for decades.
I remember before these regs were put in place, when Lake Erie would catch fire.
I expect with the current trend to lessen regs, will will see more and more dead fish, and diseases and maladies we've never run into before in our fish, and ourselves.

 

[Coryloach]

We're still doing better than some other parts of the world. I was watching a video on youtube about Asia's dirtiest rivers...Rubbish floating around, chemicals visually discolouring the water and people using the river for everything from washing their teeth, bath their babies, to using "floating" toilets.