Aquarium Water Quality – How Good Is Your Aquarium Water?

Have you thought about the quality of the water you put in your aquarium? If you just dump water in, without taking the time to properly condition the water, you could be doing a disservice to your aquatic life.

The water in your aquarium doesn’t come from the ocean or from a pure, natural water source. At least probably not (if so, great!). Because you don’t have access to natural water from the oceans of the Earth, you need to be sure you are properly conditioning and preparing the water that you put in your aquarium.

What’s In Your Water?

You should get to know the quality of the water from your main water source. The water quality in your home or office could be okay for humans, but it might contain chemicals that are quite harmful to fish and other aquatic life.

Where do you get your water from? If you continually get your aquarium water from a single source, get to know that source. Let’s use your home tap water as an example. If you always use your home tap water for your aquarium, test it for common chemicals that affect aquariums negatively. If the water source contains contaminants (it probably will!), then you should purify the water and condition it before you put it in your aquarium.

Your water source, non-purified and unconditioned, could contain any of the following chemicals:

  • chlorine
  • nitrate
  • phosphate
  • iron
  • calcium
  • silicate

All of these chemicals will cause you grief if they are in your aquarium water in unruly amounts.

Test Your Water Source

The only way you will find out what exactly is in your water is to test it. Buy a water testing kit that can be used to test for all the chemicals listed above.

If you don’t test your water, how can you expect to condition your water properly? If you find any harmful chemicals at all in your water source, you will need to either use water conditioners to neutralize the threats or buy a water purifier to clean your water of all the chemicals.

Implementing a Water Purifier

Using a water purifier to clean up your tap water is the best way to control the water quality of your aquarium with minimal effort.

Simply stripping all the chemicals out of the water is much better than adding solutions to the water to neutralize chemicals and other contaminants. While water conditioners can work well, why not just go straight to the source and purify the water?

A good water purifier will remove nearly all dissolved solids within the water. If you have hard water, you will notice that you don’t get any mineral buildup on your aquarium hardware when water evaporates. That’s because the purifier pulls all the dissolved solids out of the water!

About Luke

the owner and caretaker of a 75 gallon aquarium in his home studio. Good times.

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