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.

 

[EllenAliciaJordanScusa]

Just jumping in here because I have the same problem with ph. Except for me, I don't think anything else is high. The gh and kh look fine when I test it. So, I was going to check my tap water for its ph. But from what I remember from before, when I looked into this, aren't you supposed to wait like a day with your tap water sitting out before you test it for ph? Otherwise it wouldn't be accurate?

 

[Magnum Man]

yes, supposed to wait for the co2 to gas out

 

[anewbie]

co2 gassing would raise the ph; the reason the ph usually drops is that the water company puts a chemical in the water to keep the ph high to protect pipes (you know acid and metal....) this additive gasses out pretty fast if you let the water stand over night.

 

[seangee]

Just jumping in here because I have the same problem with ph. Except for me, I don't think anything else is high. The gh and kh look fine when I test it. So, I was going to check my tap water for its ph. But from what I remember from before, when I looked into this, aren't you supposed to wait like a day with your tap water sitting out before you test it for ph? Otherwise it wouldn't be accurate?

Just test what's in your tank, that's where the fish live. Provided that you do regular water changes it will always return to the same value (may vary slightly by time of day). If the pH in the tank is higher than what is in the tap something is raising it - most likely rocks / pebbles or your substrate.

 

[Colin_T]

Just jumping in here because I have the same problem with ph. Except for me, I don't think anything else is high. The gh and kh look fine when I test it. So, I was going to check my tap water for its ph. But from what I remember from before, when I looked into this, aren't you supposed to wait like a day with your tap water sitting out before you test it for ph? Otherwise it wouldn't be accurate?

What sort of fish do you keep?
Some fish are fine with water that has a pH above 7.0, others prefer the pH below 7.0.