tendency around here to be hard to very hard - 160 PPM to 400+ PPM - would be what else is in it. I first encountered a fishroom well when I visited a cichlid guy in the NW Chicago suburbs. His fish house (looked like a one time machine shop attached to his home) was about 75 X 15 feet (23 x 4.5 meters)! He had 30 of those 100 gallon-long aquariums and another 50-60 good sized tanks. That is a lot of water!
The room was a wearying 84 degrees F/ 29 C and on the cold February day I visited, that about wilted me. He has his own well and the water flows through his tanks and out. I noticed the water was introduced via a nozzle, which really offered up a fine spray under considerable pressure. The tank it went into has several large cichlids and some very large pacu.
I asked Rick about the nozzle. He nodded and said that it was necessary. When he first set the well water up on a slow flow, the cichlids in the first tank got more and more lethargic and died! It turns out that there was a lot of nitrogen in the water and they were suffocating of nitrogen poisoning!
That floored me! The nozzle seemed to dissipate the nitrogen into the air. Sometimes carbon dioxide can also be in quantity in well water. I supposed one could run the water through a well lit "plant filter". I would be interested in other ways to deal with those things.
Evidently the room's air temperature warmed up the spray of well water. I don't think I would want to work around the fish in a swim suit and flip flops though. ;)
Maybe you would want to get water from a well, near where you would drill, analyzed. It would have to be tested pretty soon after the water was withdrawn, I would guess. (Oh Charles...)
In his book on Commonsense Guide to Fish Health, Terry Fairfield notes that the suburban well his family used with the rental house, when they first moved to Illinois, caused his family to become very ill and a lot of his fish to die. It turns out there was E-coli in it!
All the best!
u.s.
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