to britta or not to britta

mellowvision

mellowvision

Seafood Lover
May 17, 2007
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Brooklyn NY
www.mellowvision.com
Real Name
Bill Brissette
My LFS here in NYC told me when I started out that the local water was really hard, and that I should britta all my water before adding it to the tank. I've been using a faucet style filter... but it's getting to be ridiculous. The filters wear out so fast from the repeated long term use. Right now it's taking about 20 minutes to fill up a gallon jug.

Am I wasting my time?
 
Personally, I wouldn't bother. The last place I lived had really hard water too, and my fish did just fine.
 
purchase an under-sink carbon filter.
They are usually pretty cheap, about $15-$30 here. It looks just like one stage of an RO unit, and essentially is, but it goes under your sink and filters a much larger volume of water than a britta.

You can have it hooked up seperatly as well, so you only use it for water changes.
 
I dont think any sort of filter is going to be necessary. Tap water conditioners already detoxify heavy metals and other things.

Your fish'll be fine
 
What legendaryfrog said. In addition, plants do better with water from the tap. I went through a phase early on where I was buying jugs of filtered water. I soon got tired of it, not to mention the cost, but then I learned more about keeping tanks and kept fish that do best in the water I have. In your case, I bet you'd have good luck with African Cichlids.
 
Does the britta even lower hardness? I thought it was just a carbon filter.
 
The Brita does nothing for general hardness. Even a generic water "softener" just performs an ion exchange function.

The only way to truly "soften" water is to get RO or distilled water (zero hardness, for practical purposes), and then mix it with your tap water. I used to do this, as the water in my locale is so hard you could break it with a sledge hammer...but my plants didn't do so hot.

Conditioned tap water was fine for my purposes.

Regards, N-A
 
I heard that one step RO like britta filters will greatly help on keeping hair algae at bay. That's what the LFS said anyway. I'm going to try it out next month and see.
 
I am in NYC and the water is soft, no problems, just the water conditioner like prime.
 
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