Re: New To Livebearers

Posted by Oldman on 2010/7/5 21:12:16

Many of the livebearers common in the hobby do like their water quite hard.The reason they are common in the hobby is because few people have the ultrasoft water that you are working with.

Livebearers appear in almost any environment on earth, even in the oceans, so the right livebearers probably exist for water exactly like yours. Unfortunately, many of us here arrived at livebearer keeping partly by having that hard, high pH water. You could make suitable water for typical livebearers by using calcium carbonate in one of its many forms in the flow path of your filter. A nice average kind of livebearer water for many of the fish we tend to keep would be between 7.2 and 8 on the pH scale with a GH and a KH both over 5 and for some fish over 10.