Issue with high pH

[BarbsandGobies_expert]

Without divulging your results, It's impossible for us to have any idea of "what's best".

My initial thread told you my carbonate was 300 and my pH 8.4. My Gh is 9 according to my test kit

 

[MaloK]

Ok tanks. PH is irrelevant in that matter. You can have a KH of 90 ppm and PH at 8.2....

There's nearly no amount of KH reducer you can use that will not bounce back to the parameters you have at the moment... You have water Gh is hard and KH is very hard. like livebearers and African cichlids...

If you don't have means to reduce the hardness of the water, orient your choice for harder water fishes in the future.

 

[seangee]

Agreed. There is no chemical fix, you need to keep hard water fish.
If you decide you want to keep soft water fish RO water is the way to go. I have extremely hard tap water but keep soft water fish. I pretty much tried everything before accepting this. Until then your LFS will no doubt continue to try to sell you water treatements and medications

 

[BarbsandGobies_expert]

Agreed. There is no chemical fix, you need to keep hard water fish.
If you decide you want to keep soft water fish RO water is the way to go. I have extremely hard tap water but keep soft water fish. I pretty much tried everything before accepting this. Until then your LFS will no doubt continue to try to sell you water treatements and medications

Okay thanks everyone

 

[tiggerfish]

I had the exact same issues, with the same numbers... I now RO all my soft water aquariums, & blend my tap / well water, with RO for my shrimp tanks

What is RO?

 

[Colin_T]

R/O is reverse osmosis. It's where water gets pushed through filters that remove minerals and chemicals from the water.

If you have hard water and want to keep soft water fishes, either use a reverse osmosis unit or get distilled water or rainwater and mix it 50/50 (maybe 60/40) with the tap water to reduce the pH and hardness.

----------------------

SOLAR STILL
In warm climates you can make a solar still to get pure water. It would give you pure water, no waste water (r/o units create a lot of waste water) and be free to make pure water, it just requires a bit of sunlight.

Get a large plastic storage container and put it outside in the sun.
Pour a bucket of water into the storage container.
Put a clean bucket in the middle of the storage container. Have a clean, non-porous rock in the bucket to stop it floating around.
Put the lid on the storage container.
Put a rock or small weight on the lid in the middle, so the lid sags above the bucket.

As the sun heats up the container, water will evaporate and condense on the underside of the lid. The water will run towards the centre and drip into the bucket. When the bucket is full of water, you put it into a holding container and put the bucket back in the storage container with another bucket of tap water.

You get pure water with a pH of 7.0, 0 GH, 0KH and no wasted water, no power used and it's cheap to set up.