TwoTankAmin
Fish Connoisseur
Factually incorrect statements in the thread:
"your water hardness will infulence this pH buffering"
It is KH and not GH which influences the stability of pH.
"One thing to mention. DO NOT ADD PLANTS UNTIL THE CYCLING PROCESS HAS FINISHED, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT."
The exact opposite is true. Plants should go in at the start of the cycle. Because plants consume ammonia, they reduce the amount of bacteria needed to handle ammonia etc. Waiting means you cultivate bacteria you do not need and then when you add plants those bacteria will die back over time to the level of ammonia still available for the bacteria. Plants tank some time to establish in tanks. Roots take some time to grow and anchor. Doing this is difficult in the face of fish which may uproot or detach new plants. Pants eat nitrate, this means the need to control nitrate is reduced. There is absolutely no reason not to add live plants at the outset. The person who wrote this does not seem to understand the cycling process in fw tanks.
"w can then see if there is a need to change your water chemistry, (i.e. addition of bicarbonate of soda for instance )"
Unless you are African keeping riftlake cichlids, you do not want to add sodium bicarbonate to a tank containing fish. The Na (sodium) part is not a good thing for them. It is OK to have in a tank short term as a medication or as a side effect of adding sodium chloride to get chloride into a tank to block nitrite from harming fish, but other than that you do not normally want sodium in a going fw tank.
"Why are you looking at RO water by the way>? Tropical Fish keepers only tend to use RO if there water is really hard and mix it with 50% tap water."
My tap water is pH 7.1, my tap TDS are 83 ppm (GH 5 and KH 4). I make and use about 30 gals of RO/DI water weekly. I keep only freshwater tanks. I use it for 2 reasons, to change TDS for seasonal changes to induce spawning fish and to make it possible to alter the pH by dropping the KH via the addition of the RO/DI. I mix in 20-30%.
Btw- zebra danios are a great cycling fish, They are very ammonia tolerant. They do not do as well with nitrite. Incidentally, one can block the effect of nitrite on fish internally by adding chloride at a concentration 10 times that of nitrite. Table salt is about 2/3 chloride.
As for the toxicity of nitrite, research supports the idea that nitrite levels no higher than 10% of those which will kill 50% of the fish within 96 hours (4 days) are not harmful to fish over the short term. I am still waiting for anybody to show scientific support for the statement that short term exposure to .25 ppm of nitrite on an API kit test will kill or even harm most fish.
"your water hardness will infulence this pH buffering"
It is KH and not GH which influences the stability of pH.
"One thing to mention. DO NOT ADD PLANTS UNTIL THE CYCLING PROCESS HAS FINISHED, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT."
The exact opposite is true. Plants should go in at the start of the cycle. Because plants consume ammonia, they reduce the amount of bacteria needed to handle ammonia etc. Waiting means you cultivate bacteria you do not need and then when you add plants those bacteria will die back over time to the level of ammonia still available for the bacteria. Plants tank some time to establish in tanks. Roots take some time to grow and anchor. Doing this is difficult in the face of fish which may uproot or detach new plants. Pants eat nitrate, this means the need to control nitrate is reduced. There is absolutely no reason not to add live plants at the outset. The person who wrote this does not seem to understand the cycling process in fw tanks.
"w can then see if there is a need to change your water chemistry, (i.e. addition of bicarbonate of soda for instance )"
Unless you are African keeping riftlake cichlids, you do not want to add sodium bicarbonate to a tank containing fish. The Na (sodium) part is not a good thing for them. It is OK to have in a tank short term as a medication or as a side effect of adding sodium chloride to get chloride into a tank to block nitrite from harming fish, but other than that you do not normally want sodium in a going fw tank.
"Why are you looking at RO water by the way>? Tropical Fish keepers only tend to use RO if there water is really hard and mix it with 50% tap water."
My tap water is pH 7.1, my tap TDS are 83 ppm (GH 5 and KH 4). I make and use about 30 gals of RO/DI water weekly. I keep only freshwater tanks. I use it for 2 reasons, to change TDS for seasonal changes to induce spawning fish and to make it possible to alter the pH by dropping the KH via the addition of the RO/DI. I mix in 20-30%.
Btw- zebra danios are a great cycling fish, They are very ammonia tolerant. They do not do as well with nitrite. Incidentally, one can block the effect of nitrite on fish internally by adding chloride at a concentration 10 times that of nitrite. Table salt is about 2/3 chloride.
As for the toxicity of nitrite, research supports the idea that nitrite levels no higher than 10% of those which will kill 50% of the fish within 96 hours (4 days) are not harmful to fish over the short term. I am still waiting for anybody to show scientific support for the statement that short term exposure to .25 ppm of nitrite on an API kit test will kill or even harm most fish.
