Hiya i was just wondering can you use water from bathrooms...im just wondering because the water from there is different to the tap water in the kitchen...and iv been using tap water from bathroom..also can you put sucker fish in fresh water??? thnx

Thats something ive also been wondering. Ive always used tapwater from the bathroom as otherwise id be lugging buckets up the stairs but im not sure whether it could be negatively affected my fish. As far as I understand it the cold water from the tap upstairs will be coming from the tank but downstairs it will be coming from the mains? And in the tank its likely to have higher mineral deposits. Im really not sure! I hope someone else knows more!

It's better to use it from the drinking water taps, like kitchen and outside. I use it from outside in the summer (in the winter the outside tap is always too cold and is usually frozen).
I think the thing with the upstairs stuff is that there is lots of copper and other metals in it, from the pipes and stuff. But I thought most water conditioners deal with that?
I did read somewhere there was a guy who lost a whole tank of fish because he was constantly doing small water changes and topping up evaporated water with non-drinking water and the copper content of the tank got so high it killed everything.
But that was because he was topping up, not taking water out (when water evaporates, the copper is left behind (I think?)).

Lucy, I would think that the lack of decent water changes finally catched up to the fish. Just topping the water off isn't nearly as good as a nice sized water change.
Thinking of bathrooms - ours is a downstairs bathroom, so I'd assume that the water comes from the same source than the kitchen faucet, no? And if in doubt, there are filters that can be attached to almost any faucet. At our old place I had one, made from Pure, and it worked just fine.

oh right thanx for that i was just a bit concernd coz the water from bathrooms are different....and sorry made a wrong question about the sucker fish...i was meant to ask can you put them in cold water not fresh...if not are there any other fish that can clean the glass(exept snails)there are these wierd looking ones in my local fish shop but there fish seem to look odd(like tails shredded and so on)so i would want to risk getting anything from there thnx

I think all the water in my house is the same, regardless of the tap it comes out of.

We only have one water line running to the house, and other than the split that takes some of it to the hot water heater, all the piping is the same.

Is there any reason why my bathroom water would be different than the water in the rest of the house? I've been drinking out of it for years, and filling the tank out of there.

i worry about that sometimes, as i use bathroom water, not kitchen. It is different as the tap water downstairs comes from drinking water lines, managed and 'purified' by the water companies, wheras i think bathroom water comes from a tank and goes to the boiler for hot and directly to the taps for cold. It's not as clean as kitchen tap water, as it's not as fresh i think.

I think thats the case in my house too. I read somewhere that modern houses dont have a water tank in the UK though thats not true because our house is less than 10 tens old and operates with a tank in the loft. Water from the tank because it sits 'stagnant' until used therefore is able to gather minerals depending on when it was last cleaned, and there is also the risk that things could contaminate the tank. Or at least from reading around thats what I now understand! I think ill try using kitchen water from now.