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Tank is 40 gallons good news… no deaths since the original post. Fingers crossed this trend continues. i was able to get the right water chemistry needed with a mix of tap and distilled. Plan going forward, Slowly lowering the TDS and GH in hopes of saving these little guys. Small increments at a time every 3-4 days with 5-10% water changes. Hoping to get the entire tank down to the right parameters over several weeks.

Well done. good to hear you are starting towards getting the high GH and TDS under control.

Very pleased to hear you haven't had any more deaths, just be aware though that it may happen until everything is settled with the water, but you can aim to prevent it as much as possible. My oldest tank has bloody mary (neocaridina) in it and I mix 50/50 tap water and filtered water, and have done 5+ years so your mixture option SHOULD work! I'm not sure if you are a numbers person or not, but if you do 5% water changes twice a week with the 50/50 mix you will be months, possibly even up to a year until you get the aquarium to where those parameters are where you want them. I would go for 10% each water change (and you could do that once a week) with 100% distilled water DRIPPED into the tank, the shrimps should be fine with this as this would happen in the wild as rain fall which is just water with low/nil TDS. Every subsequent change will actually reduce the difference less as the water you extract each time has a lower TDS than the previous water that was removed so doing too small but more often changes will actually take a LOT longer than I think you realise! Doing this method with pure distilled water of 10% aquarium capacity) should go, starting aquarium tds 600 (est) 1st 10% change tank tds 540 (tds 10% lower than before, ie 600-60) 2nd 10% change tank tds 486 (tds 10% lower than before, ie 540-54) 3rd 10% change tank tds 438 (tds 10% lower than before, ie 486-48) 4th 10% change tank tds 394 (tds 10% lower than before, ie 438-44) 5th 10% change tank tds 354 (tds 10% lower than before, ie 394-40) So after about a month/6 weeks you will be near enough there. Then maybe start changing with the 50/50 mix you propose. Hope this makes sense? Basically doing 5% twice a week will take forever as you are reducing the tds in such small increments each time, though if you feel happier doing it thay way it will work, just take a lot longer and involve extra work! These figures are unlikely to happen exactly the same as your tank of course, due to all the variables, but just show how it should roughly go. Just for info, if you did one 50% (same quantity as above ie 5x10%) in one go obviously the tds would go from 600 to 300 (as opposed to 354 above), just so you can see how the smaller and more frequent the changes don't reduce the tds as much, though obviously with shrimp in the tank it wouldn't work doing one huge 50% change........ Sorry for the mega post, hope it makes sense though??? edit - just done other figures 10 changes of 5% with distilled water end Tds 360, so same time and water as above but twice as many changes. Not that much in it between mentioned and your original proposal so take you pick, dependant on how many changes you want to do and the water available, maybe better to do 3-4 day 5% distilled water changes? 10 changes of 5% with 50/50 tap water/distilled water end tds 466.