A post to RTR

I'm not RTR, but I did sleep in a Holiday Inn last night...

Here's my recipe (you may need to adjust depending your tap water parameters):

1 - 4 lb bag of epsom salts
2 lbs. baking soda

Mix together and add 1 tablespoon per ten gallons of new water.

I also add Aragamilk, a good source of carbonates at 1 tablespoon per 40 gallons of new water. (It's a liquid, so I don't include it in the mix above.)

I'd be interested in others' recipes, too.

HTH,
Jim

The extent to which your buffer (KH, supplied in part by the baking soda) will get used up has a lot to do with bioload. In a lightly stocked tank, it should be OK. In a tank with a higher bioload (like cichlid tanks tend to be), it might not be enough. That's why I supplement with a more stable form of buffer, the Aragamilk. (You can get a powdered version, AragaMight, but I don't think it goes as far.) The Aragamilk provides a very stable buffer and you can't overdose with it. Enough of it will dissolve to buffer the water and take pH to about 8 or so. The rest will settle out of the water and dissolve as needed to maintain KH and pH.

Using this method, I see very little change in water parameters before and after changes.

I'd mix up a batch of this, treat a known volume of water (e.g., ten gallons) and see what your paramters are a day later. If they're where you want, you ready to go. If something (e.g., GH) isn't where you want it, increase or decrease the proportion of that ingredient in the mix.


HTH,
Jim

Rather than use "softened" heated water for your changes, I would consider getting a 32g trash barrel, filling that with unheated, unsoftened water (presumably from an outside faucet) and heating it with a heater (add an airstone too, if you feel like it, to keep the water moving). Then you can treat in the barrel and use that water for changes after a few hours.

The reason for this is the net effect that water softeners (which exchange sodium ions for calcium and magnesium ions) have on your water. If I understand it correctly, the water isn't really softer in the sense that it has less TDS, it is just easier to make soap suds in because there's less calcium and magnesium and more sodium. Since the Rift Lakes have almost no sodium chloride as part of their mineral mix, they really don't benefit from the sodium in softened water. You're adding back the calcium and magnesium, but all that extra sodium is still in there.

Ha! "My" personal makeup for Rift Lake water is a tap water plus aragonite substrate. My tap is GH 9, KH 7, pH 7.8. I don't need to do anything but ensure stability via the subtrate chosen and use that over OE-RFUG to keep it all stable. I do age change water w/circlation through aragonite or coral rubble in a canister for such fish. Stable as a rock for me with mbuna. The only grassbed/sandbed Rift fish I ran were the same water, same substrate, Val rather than rockwork. That was a bit less stable until I pushed the water change levels up to what I used for mbuna and keep the Val trimmed to less excessive mass - the Val tended to overgrow and could push the pH up if not controlled (biogenic decalcification), which is not desirable at all, downright dangerous (comparable to ODing pH-Up).

I recently quoted Dr. Paul Loiselle's supplements for Rift water make-up in a thread. But I never needed to use it myself. Moderately hard water I am blessed/cursed with by location (Catoctin Mts. in MD) for the last nearly 30 years. Hard water fish love me. Soft water fish may not, so I don't bred them.

No water softeners in my life, plain ordinary tap. No RO either, but I have done in the past. I've outgrown water mods other than for reef/delicate SW (which I have also given up), meaning that I am too old and cranky to deal with it all. The older I get,the less I do to "custom" water. And I have to admit that now if I wanted to start with RO, I'd go commercial out of pure laziness.

Jim Schmidt's mix sounds like a good place to start, given your super-soft (by hobby kits) and treated water, but I suspect that you will need somthing such as RO-Right or the Seachem salt mixes to get a full mineral balance. I'd also get a TDS meter to use as a baseline and comparison to the finished products. Processed water which registers super-soft by GH and KH may not be in reality soft by TDS. That makes a big difference for the blackwater fish, not so much for the Rift fish, where given some significant TDS, and stabilty, and the presence of a few particular ions (the potassium and magnesium Dr. Loiselle pushes) which are critical. Hobby-useful TDS meters start below $50 bucks.

Look at it this way, Slappy - you can keep anything, breed most, at the cost of a few water mods. I have to weigh getting out the RO and setting an independent reservoir and tank if I want to play with softwater fish.