WM> Help wanted: I am hesitant to keep dumping in chemicals after
 WM> every water change.  It just seems like a bad idea.  What
 WM> other ways are there, if any, to lower ph, and keep it low?
 WM> We refer to these fish as our children, and would like them to
 WM> be healthy and happy.
get yourself a distiller... my father has one he got at Sears to distill our 
water with... our water has a huge amount of suspended solids in it so all 
water we drink or cook with goes thru the distiller... he paid about $100US 
($89US - $109US) for it... it does a gallon of water in about 5-6 hours... we 
have 6 or 8 gallon jugs that we bought specifically to store our water in. as 
it is out here, i use nothing but distilled water in my 15gal tank... it has 
a nice OSCAR in it... handsized at the moment... and hungry all the time ;-)  
when i add water after "vaccuming" out the tank or just to replace that lost 
thru evaporation, i use the distilled stuff and have never added any 
chemicals to it... i just noticed that you are in canada... hopefully they 
have a sears store up there near you or at least some place where you can 
locate a distiller...
)\/(ark
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