PH

[mojosodope]

+1 to what steeler1 said. Unless you want to breed neons you're fine. Unless your neons are wild caught (unlikely) your pH is more than fine and many keep their neons in similar or harder water with no ill effect. Stability is what matters.

[Cermet]

Just to clarify, activated carbon does not leach anything back into the water.

Lets be very clear - charcoal, when saturated absoultly does leach stuff back into the water - I have researched this topic in detail and read papers that prove this does happen. Experiments have been done that prove this.

[funkman262]

If you don't mind sharing those articles, I'd like to see tests showing that this does happen under the conditions of our aquariums. Thanks.

[funkman262]

I couldn't find anything proving what you claim, but I did stumble across this article. It's not much, but it's the only thing I could find with tests within the water parameters that we keep our fishtanks. It essentially shows that saturated activated carbon used for wastewater only leached metals under incredibly acidic conditions.

It's becoming more common these days for drinking water treatment plants to use granular activated carbon (GAC) as a media for biological treatment (very similar to our aquaria). I've been doing research for the past 1.5 years focusing on the use of GAC and bacteria for the removal of various compounds. The site that I conduct my research is a 90MGD (million gallon per day average) treatment plant that uses this method with massive filter beds containing GAC. They haven't replaced the GAC in over 10 years since the plant was constructed (although they do need to top the beds off each year to compensate for GAC lost during backwashes), and they have to abide by very strict water quality levels set by the EPA. You'd think that with the sheer volume of water that they filter (which is also lower quality than what's in our tanks), they'd be having problems abiding by EPA regulations if they were experiencing any leaching from their media. But no, they aren't.

[Tiari]

Its pretty likely your Betta is killing the RCS. They don't have to eat them to kill them. My Betta Ty would kill ghost shrimp, then just leave them