When you say your water is "hard", what do you mean? What is your KH and GH
levels? The reason why I ask is that fish *like* hard water; so do the
biobugs in your filter. Most of us end up putting baking soda into the water
to increase the KH, especially if you have a bead type filter, which needs a
KH of over 200 in order to properly "feed" the biobugs - so that it will
function to optimum. With well water, you need to be more worried about
things like iron and sulphur - not to mention that there's no oxygen in well
water and it needs to be aerated.

But to answer your original question: initially I thought that if softened
water was good for me, it would be good for the fish. Then their coloring
started to suffer, and investigation into possible reasons led me to bypass
the softener when I do water exchanges, etc.

Lee

"Mickey" wrote in message
...
I have hard well water that is not softened. Is there a way to soften it ?
have thought about using the water from the house that is softened but it
is
city water and that might get expensive fast I have about 3000 gallons of
pond water. Maybe I will start topping off the pond with soft house water
after doing an initial fill with well water.