Question:
My wife and I are new to the aquarium world and setup our first aquarium a couple of months ago. We're having a terrible time getting the pH level down to where it ought to be (we have a plain tropical, freshwater aquarium - 46 gal). It turns out that our municipal water is just too high a pH and not good to use in the aquarium. The pet store folks suggested using distilled water. This is fine with me, but I'm not sure how to go about this. I don't want to lug a zillion 1 gallon jugs of distilled water from the supermarket and am looking for other options. Is it convenient and/or cost effective to get home delivery of dist. water? To somehow make my own? Will bottled drinking water work instead? I'd appreciate any ideas from anyone who's grappled with this in the past.

Answer: You can buy bottled water, but don't assume it has the pH you want - test it to be sure. As you noted, though, this will mean a lot of jugs being carried around, and in a 46 gallon tank may be expensive.

You might also look into a reverse osmosis (RO) setup. All kinds of articles about this on the web, so give Google a look. The short of it is that RO removes pretty much everything from the water, resulting in a distilled end product. It can be expensive, depending on your needs.

Lastly, you can lower the pH with chemical treatment, though in general experienced aquarists are of the opinion that the less junk you put in your tank, the better.

Some natural approaches that have similar effect are to add driftwood to the tank, which will lower the pH somewhat, as well as looking nice and giving your fish something to swim around. Also, running your water through peat moss will help lower the pH. Again, do a Google search for this.