# Water Softener Salt Contain Materials Poisionous To Inverts/Shrimp?



## DutchMuch

My friend just had the brightest thing ive heard in a long while.
Back a year ago or so i kept my fluval spec v with cherry shrimp in it, and i was using straight distilled water in the tank. Well whenever i switched to the well water which had the same PH as the distilled, etc, all the shrimp died over about a week.

here is his idea on why:
_@Dutchmuch personally I would probably lean towards yes, that may have been the cause of your demise. I switched our our hard water before the softener which was pretty bad and even they they were better off.
It's crazy because every test I did to the softened water showed the water parameters being practically perfect, but I never did a copper test cus I didn't have one, which from what ivhad found (very little info on it) it seemed as though alot of the salts you buy for water softeners I believe have copper in them or something which is like kryptonite to shrimp and stuff I guess?

Don't quote me on this stuff tho I'm just going off my personal experience haha. So far though, my RO filter ( I have the iSpring RCC7 off Amazon it's tight under 200 bucks I highly recommend it) and adding salty shrimp everything has been great!

And it filters the water AFTER the water softener
So whatever the water softener may do to my water the RO filter must be taking it out
At least it seems that way. I know my TDS is like 7 ppm after the RO filter and the gh and kh we're both practically zero. Whereas the softener my TDS is stound ~200ish tds.

It's actually probably something to do with the brine/ resin that the water runs through in the water softener that may add stuff to the water they don't like_

Sorry if that's hard to read.
Any opinions on this if its right or not? if its right that explains A lot.


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## DutchMuch

Bump


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## mistergreen

Your TDS meter says it all. If you switch RO/distilled water to softened water, the shrimps would have a hard time acclimating.

Water softeners DON'T make water 'softer' (lower TDS). Your TDS meter confirms that. It only removes Ca and replaces with Na or K. 

Your RO removes most of the dissolve solids, lowering the TDS, making it 'softer'.


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## DutchMuch

so what if you have an RO filter AFTER the water softener, is that okay ? Just use salty shrimp to add the gh/kh after ?


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## mistergreen

It doesn't matter if you use RO before or after the water softener. The RO will do its job.
Then you can use 'Salty Shrimp' to remineralize the RO water to whatever parameter.

ps. Well water might have farming contaminants so it's a problem. RO should take care of that too. You can also run water through activated carbon to remove any dangerous chemicals.


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## DutchMuch

@mistergreen i live on 30 acres, well water does not have any contaminants. We drink it from the spicket. *also got it tested at the extension office*
I used well water in some of my tanks back about a year ago.


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## DutchMuch

bumper carts


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## jpward1981

I know that this post is fairly old, but figured I would give it a reply anyways. In your softener are you using Sodium or Pottasium for the softener media? 

I have a water softener connected to my house and i have had to do the same thing that you are doing to prepare the water for use in some of my shrimp tanks. I attempted once to use potassium in my softener as I know that plants need potassium, figured why not. That killed my entire colony of shrimp in a matter of minutes. Up to that point, I had been using sodium chloride in my softener and all of the shrimp in my neo tank had been doing just fine. (I have always used RO in my Cardina tank.)

The sodium and potassium, unless you test specifically for those will not show up on any test, the water will show as being perfect but will show on a TDS meter.

I hope that this may explain what may have happened to the shrimp in your tank.


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