Over the previous two years, the number of people getting involved in fish keeping has skyrocketed with the number of fish keepers being at an all-time high and still seeing strong month on month growth.
With there being such a high number of people new to fish keeping out there at the moment, we have noticed a huge spike in the number of people who are reaching out each month and asking various questions about what they should be doing with their fish tanks to keep their fish healthy.
We have seen a number of questions specifically based around using spring water for a fish tank over the last six months or so due to a popular YouTuber in the fish keeping space saying how they use spring water for their fish tanks.
Due to seeing so many people reaching out and asking about using spring water for a fish tank as well as so many people misunderstanding how you use spring water for a fish tank, we decided to publish this dedicated article.
Our goal is to try and help as many of our readers better understand exactly what they should be doing when it comes to the water that they use in their freshwater fish tanks.
We also want to go over how some people use spring water with fish tanks and try and help people understand the specific use case for spring water in fish keeping as many people make easy to avoid mistakes with it.
Is Natural Spring Water Safe For A Fish Tank?
The term “natural spring water” is not specific enough to explain exactly what is in the water and it simply means that the water comes from a natural spring.
The majority of spring water has different amounts of trace minerals in them that are perfectly safe for humans to drink but can cause problems with your fish if you use nothing but spring water in your aquarium without taking steps to treat it prior to use.
A common strategy is to use spring water in small amounts to reduce the pH levels of your aquarium as it can be a quick, easy, and cheap method that many people within the fish keeping hobby tend to use.
The thing that you have to keep in mind is that many people on YouTube and social media simply say that they used spring water in their aquarium without going into the specifics so many people new to fish keeping presume that they mean that they filled their tank with nothing but spring water.
Although there are ways that you can full your aquarium with nothing but spring water, you usually have to take steps to treat the water with something like a tap water conditioner product that should easily be able to get any potential harmful minerals in the water within safe parameters too.
The majority of our readers will be much better off if they choose to just go with tap water and use the conditioners on that though as it works out much cheaper than mineral water.
Should You Use Spring Water For Your Fish Tank?
The majority of people in the fish keeping hobby who do use spring water in their fish tanks specifically use it to tweak the pH levels of their tank with the spring water only being used in very small amounts.
If you do need to tweak the pH levels and don’t have any other products that are able to do it available then you can consider using spring water to get the job done.
We would never recommend that our readers use spring water to fill their tanks as it works out considerably more expensive than tap water while also often needing to be treat with some type of conditioning product anyway.
The larger your aquarium, the more water you will require too and the higher your prices will end up being in most situations when looking to fill your tanks with spring water.
Depending on the amount of tweaking that you need to do with the pH levels in your tank, spring water may be able to do the trick but other cheap ways to tweak water parameters such as water changes or chemical products should usually be used for larger bodies of water or when you require a drastic change to pH.
Slight changes and smaller tanks definitely do tend to do better with a small amount of spring water being used as a way to adjust tank pH levels though.
Conclusion
That brings our article going over using spring water for a fish tank to an end. We hope that we have been able to help our readers better understand some of the more common mistakes that we see people from the fish keeping community make when it comes to using spring water in their aquariums as well as how you are able to use it in some specific situations. In our opinion though, there will almost always been a number of better options available for most people that allow you to do the same things as spring water but at a much cheaper price and often using a much easier method too.
