Review on 🔬 Seachem Equilibrium 600g by Heather Armstrong

* * * We have had a 20 to 110 gallon aquarium in our home for almost 25 years and we have both freshwater and saltwater. About 15 years ago we bought our first Boesemani Rainbow and were addicted to this fish! Brilliant coloring of freshwater fish; We now have Boesemani, Turquoise, Banded, Red, and Praecox (Neon) rainbows that have grown to about three inches in length. Our current aquarium is a 72 gallon arch that we fill with water from a reverse osmosis faucet. It features a biobead-based biological filtration system, as well as a pond pump that forces water through a UV canister to fight algae. About 2 years ago we moved into a new house for ourselves and after a few months we started to get weird with the tank. No matter how much sodium bicarbonate we carefully added, we couldn't get the PH test kit much above 6 and then we started losing fish. The local aquarium staff was very nice and suggested that our tap water was our problem; They said our county's tap water is 0.5-1.0 dGH (total hardness about 17 ppm) and rainbow is 10-15+ dGH (180+ ppm). They also found that the reverse osmosis process can also lower GH levels, and that extremely low GH levels (or conversely, ultra-high GH levels) can lead to false PH test results. to focus on increasing GH. I use a 5 gallon bucket for water changes and the reverse osmosis water is poured into the bucket as it is being produced. We put the balancing mixture in a bucket with new reverse osmosis water and stir vigorously with a long wooden spoon until it is sufficiently well mixed. around 7. As the GH approached 100ppm, the PH test results rose to 8. So these good aquarists were right! We're now back in the normal water cycle and have used Equilibrium a bit to keep things balanced. Over the last 20 months our rainbows have been pretty happy and their colors have been reappearing. We even had unexpected births. that looks like turquoise and striped rainbow fish. We caught one just in time to keep it from becoming breakfast and kept it in the paddock for about three months. He is now about 1.5 inches long and has been released to live with the others. Really amazing. I'm guessing we must have lived in places where the tap water was medium hardness as we've never had this problem and never tested tanks for GH before. Good that we now know what to do. Seachem Equilibrium is our friend. If you have a similar need, we highly recommend this.