I just heard that aloe is bad for fish. Can this be true? I use a water additive with aloe in it. Ahhh! Am I doing it wrong?
-PenelopeFish

I don't think so because stress coat has aloe in it and i think lots of people on here use that.

Hopefully someone else will be able to say for sure,

Rachel

yea, Stress Coat is the product I use...

While Stresscoat is ok to use. The aloe in it can make the slime coat on the fish very thick and may cause problems eventually. I wouldn't use it just to be on the safe side. Maybe if you want to only do it occasionally and get another water conditioner to use all the time.

I don't recommend using it as the aloe can coat the gills as well. As Laurie pointed out, it might not get the fish today but prolong use is not recommended. In any case, there are lots of other water treatment products that are safer to use and cheaper as well.

ok, what other products do you recommend? I'm in uk so there doesn't seem to be much choice.

Thanks,

Rachel

Hi Rachel,

The fundamental thing you need to know is what is your source water like. If the water coming out of your tap is of reasonable quality, not too hard, not too soft, has decent amount of carbonate, some electrolytes. Then you only need to remove any chlorine/chloramine that has been added to treat the water. Any half way decent "water ager", "tap water treatment" will do the job (if you want real UK brand names, I'll look them up for you). The only exception is if you know that your water have a heavy metal problem then you would need something that will neutralise that as well. But most of the time, town water is strictly monitored, we hope.

Beyond that, you are starting to get into the smoke and mirror stuff. Okay, you can get stuff to promote slime coat but who is to say that their slime coat is not of the best quality already? You can add vitamins and minerals. All these should be in a well balanced fish diet. Anything that you can think of that is suppose to make your fish healthy, live longer and happier can be added to a bottle.

The most fundamental thing that the fish need is good, clean, dechlored water with no ammonia, nitrIte and minimum nitrAte. Stable environment in terms of pH, temp and oxygen level. A healthy balanced diet and those fish can fight off 99.9% of all pathogens.

Thanks captk.

I have tested my tap water with the test kit i have for the tank but i'm not sure how to check for heavy metals or electrolytes. I'm also not sure whether my water is too hard.

Test kit readings are:
Ammonia 0ppm
Nitrire 0ppm
Nitrate 5-10ppm
pH 7.2 straight out of the tap and 8.4 after 24 hours standing (pH of the tank is 8)
GH 412ppm
KH 251ppm

If i only need to dechlor the water i'll see what water conditioner i can get from the lfs. They have a couple of types but the stress coat was the only one i'd heard of.

Thanks for the help,

Rachel

Yeah, your water reading are not bad at all. Certainly the ammonia, nitrIte and nitrAte are spot on.

GH is high so you have hard water. KH is good and that explains why your pH is around 8. Interesting that your pH goes up so much after standing. You probably have a fair bit of dissolved CO2 in your water.

You should have some electrolytes in the water and even a few pinch of salt would give the electrolytes a boost.

From what I see, a generic water conditioner will do fine in your tank as long as you keep the water good and the environment is stable. Excellent!

Ok thanks, do i need to check for metals and things or if the fish have been ok up to now (had them over a year) should it be ok?

I'm just wondering because the water round here is known to have lots of dissolved minerals in it because it used to be used as spa water in roman and georgian times - its also slightly blue when you run a bath full! I don't know what minerals there are tho and googling for 'bath water' gives very funny results! lol

If in doubt, the best thing to do is talk to your local water supplier or get their annual report or even visit their website. They should have regular test results on heavy metal and such.