Ph At 8.8 !

[tunerhead24]

I'm at day 4 into the cycle and my stats are as follows amonia 2ppm, nitrite 0ppm, nitrate 0ppm, and PH 8.8 ppm. I know my first mistake was not cycling with a heater and a air pump but I just had baught them tonight. My ammonia levels have been dropping , I been keeping them at 5 ppm. Thanks for taking intrest in my post.




Manny

 

[LauraFrog]

Having levels at 8.8 during cycling is not really a problem, in fact it's probably a good thing. When your tank is cycling, and I forget who I'm borrowing this description off, sorry - you should see the water as like a special soup for growing the bacteria in. Once you have a population of them established they usually prove fairly tough, and will survive most water conditions. It's getting them growing that's the hard part. You can work on why the pH is up so high and bringing it down once the tank is cycled.

What's the pH of the tap water, what substrate is on the bottom of the tank, and are there any rocks or pebbles in the tank?

 

[jnms]

When I cycled my tank the Ph went up to 9.0 - eventually after a few days, it came back down again.

 

[waterdrop]

I'm the "bacteria soup man" Laura. Happy to have any member borrow the analogy! The ideal soup is supposed to be (29C/84F temp, 8.0-8.4 pH, ammonia topped to 5ppm and watched until dropped to 0ppm (zero ppm)) but fishless cycling will work with a pretty wide range of the various parameters.

There is supposed to be some "high pH" (many said up around pH=9) where the bacteria can be killed but I've not heard members give evidence of that actually happening to them and its interesting to hear from jmns that 9.0 did not kill his off.

Manny, a frequent misunderstanding is thinking that you top up the ammonia to 5ppm right away whenever it drops to zero, but actually you only add ammonia once a day at about the 24 hour mark from the last time you added ammonia and then only if it did indeed drop all the way to zero during the previous 24 hours. It does not hurt the fishless cycle at all for ammonia to measure zero for part of the 24 hour period.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OldMan47]

Tunerhead, have you taken a tap water sample yet? If tap water is left to sit out over night and tested, the resulting pH is one you can shoot for using just tap for a water change. Anywhere between 7 and 8 will be fine for most fish so that would mean we can worry about pH later if at all.

 

[tunerhead24]

Im gonna let my tap water sit overnight and i'll check it in the morning, by the way i have no substrates in the tank yet im waiting for the eco-complete to arrive, i had to order it from the net, none of my lfs had it. By the way how much of the eco complete should i us for my tank? i have a 55 gallon 48x13 tank. i just bought 50 lbs of gravel, and im planning to mix the gravel with the eco-complete, can i mix the two or will i be wasting my time?

 

[LongS]

I have really high ph levels aswell. Nice to know this isn't a problem for the fishless cycle as i was beggining to worry. I think i am at the same sort of stage as you are in my cycle of my 95 litre.

Thanks for bringing this up. Keep us updated mate.