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Betta Water: How To Make Tap Water Friendly to Your Betta
Getting the water right for your betta is extremely important. Get it wrong, and your
betta will die much sooner than it needed to, if not within a few months. The good news
is that getting the water right is extremely easy. There's no need to stress about it at all.
Tap water can definitely be used for bettas. It needs to be treated, but after that, its much better
than distilled water. Distilled water is so pure that it lacks trace minerals and elements that your betta actually needs.
You can use the "betta water" bottles sold in pet stores. This is kinda like buying a 2oz container of water when you're thirsty and standing next to a water fountain, because a) its not going to last long and b) you've got perfectly good water on hand anyway. Buying bottled betta water is kinda throwing your money away, but I suppose it might make sense if there was some sort of weird emergency.
The bottled betta water makes me nervous because it also suggests how small a container some bettas are living in. Even if you get a jumbo bottle of 33.8 oz (sold at Petco for for $4.79 (!), that's only .26 gallons. Barely a quarter of a gallon. Even if you want to be minimally good to your fish, that means you'll need to buy four of those bottles to change the water in a one gallon bowl. That's $19.16 (plus tax) to change the water in the betta's bowl. In five days, you're going to need to clean the bowl out again. That's crazy.
Treating Tap Water
The vastly better solution is to plan ahead. Even an hour ahead. Fill a large bowl (one that's about 20% larger than your betta's bowl... you might need a small bucket) with room-temperature tap water. Be absolutely 100% sure that the bowl or bucket is clean - so clean that there are no traces of cleaning materials. Leaving behind even a whisp of flooring-washing soap might be enough to kill a betta fish. If you're really worried or not sure, go to a cheap department store and buy a cheap little bucket.
Let the water sit. After about 20 minutes, you'll be able to see little bubbles forming on the sides of the bucket. The bubbles contain gases that can harm your betta. Let the bucket sit for at least half an hour - preferably 4 hours. Some people let them sit for a week, but if your house is like mine, a bucket sitting for a week is either going to get dirty, knocked over, or drunk out of by a cat or a dog.
After an hour or so, stir in a measured, appropriate portion of tap water treatment. There are many kinds - you have lots of options here. I've added promos for some I like on this page. I use the Nutrafin myself, but I'm going to try the Tetra because the Nutrifin comes in such a small container that it gets pricey. The Kent and the Seachem options are included here because those are both really good companies - I've used their stuff for breeding discus, which is considerably more challenging than keeping betta fish.
The Tetra treatment (like the Kent Betta Bowl Essentials treatment, and the Seachem Betta Basics treatment, and the Nutrafin Betta Plus Tap Water Conditioner for Bettas) will take out the chlorine, chloramines, and heavy metals that are toxic to your fish. It will also add stuff to the water that will give your fish an extra protective slime coating. This helps a lot for travel stress, ammonia stress (more on that below) and just keeping the fish in good health. Finally, all these water treatments will also adjust the pH of the water so that its betta friendly. "Betta friendly" pH is a touch below neutral - about 6.9 or so.
What these treatments won't do is get rid of ammonia. Again, there are a over a dozen different products for treating ammonia. I've listed one here just for ease of use. I'm mostly writing for people who are keeping a single betta in a bowl, so as long as you're cleaning the bowl as frequently as you should be, ammonia isn't going to be that big of an issue. If you're not cleaning it often enough, frankly, adding an ammonia treatment isn't going to get you very far. You need to clean out the bowl. It takes 15 minutes or less. You can do it between commercials.
If you do have a tank that's too large to change 90% of the water at a time, you should know about ammonia treatments. You'll also need to know about "new tank syndrome", but that's a topic for another article. You can also add salt (aquarium salt, please, NOT table salt) to your betta's bowl, but its optional and best left to disucss in another article.
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