would a simple shower head filter lower the hard water for my fish tank?

Question:

ive posted many things about this and i still need help with hard water. the fish i have give the most color when in soft water so i really want to try this. so wld a shower filter work for lowering the hardness? i get my water from the shower obviously and im hope this will help without hurting the fish

Answers:

For more intense colors, softening your water may bring out more color, but so might having a dark background and substrate, and loads of plants in the tank. Food plays a big part in fish color too. And so does the tank lighting, if you don't have the same lighting as the store where you bought your fish, they may not show the same color. And when first bringing them home, the stress of being moved and in a new setup will have them looking faded for a while. If you aren't addressing all these things that figure into their color, just changing the hardness may not make much of a difference.

If your "shower filter" is the kind that are used on kitchen sink faucets, using activated carbon, that may remove certain pollutants from the water, but it will not affect hardness or Total Dissolved Solids.

The solution to your problem is to change fish, not water. It is much simpler to keep fish that will do well in the kind of water that you can most easily provide than to be constantly trying to manipulate your water chemistry. If you insist on trying to change the inevitable then you're going to spend some big money. The way to change your water from hard to soft is to buy "Reverse Osmosis" system and rebuild the water from scratch. People have used "ion exchange" (salt rechargeable) systems,but you eventually wind up with too much sodium in the final product. Sorry.