Hello BettaBoysGirl and Welcome to TFF!
Congratulations on discovering TFF and learning about Fishless Cycling. Its one of the most core skills of the hobby and a great way to get a hands on feel for what the Nitrogen Cycle is all about. Knowing to be thinking about the nitrogen cycle becomes a second nature response when things don't seem right with your fish or your tank.
pH is another area of fishkeeping that, like the nitrogen cycle, is not obvious, is commonly misunderstood in a number of way and probably has aspects that even the experts don't fully understand. I'll try to share a couple of the common things we pass on to beginners.
The most important base guideline that beginners need to learn is that its pH *stability* (numbers not changing too fast or going too far) that indicates a better fish environment, rather than a particular pH number or range. This is despite the fact that you will always see ideal pH ranges noted for individual species of fish. Although it does vary by species, beginners often have no information to help them appreciate just what a wide range of pH values a typical common tropical can live comfortably in. Often the ideal pH ranges quoted are really more about what it takes to successfully breed the fish, not what it can live in.
Many popular tropicals that might be noted to like soft, acid water will probably live quite happily in your 7.8 to 8.0 pH water... as long as it stays at a pretty stable pH. A pH of 7.8 to 8.0 is actually quite a nice pH from which to run a community tank. There are even forces that will want to pull pH downwards (like the nitrogen cycle process itself and the popular decoration of decorative wood), leaving a tank like yours settling at an even more neutral number possibly (not to say that there's anything ideal about neutral, there's not!)
How does a good aquarist achieve "stable water?" The place to work from is whatever you've been given by your home location. The pH of the water that comes out of the tap is your friend. That tap water will always be your main liquid in case of emergency (water changes are usually the "main fix it" of a good aquarist.) If your water is constantly "altered" by you (with chemicals or other procedures) then you risk a day coming when your own tap water will be so different that if its used in an emergency, it will kill the fish.
Yes, there are techniques that are considered "best practice" if one truly needs or decides to maintain their tank water in an altered state. There are three: Baking Soda (sodium bicarbonate) is used to raise pH when there are no fish (as in fishless cycling.) Crushed Coral (broken up coral and seashells) are used in a mesh bag in the filter as way of slowly raising pH when there -are- fish. And "RO plus tap-back" is the method of choice if one had to lower pH. That stands for Reverse Osmosis (a method of forcing water through a membrane that has microscopic pores and removes all minerals and other substances) plus then adding back a fraction of your high pH tap water such that you come back up to a desired pH. BUT, I repeat, its highly doubtful your situation needs this. This is just for education.
You'll notice that I mentioned minerals being removed in the RO process. Its actually the mineral content that is of importance to fish. Fish must have a finely tuned system for maintaining the osmotic pressure balance their cells need, and their system of doing this can only withstand so much shuffling of minerals back and forth to acheive the "water hardness" that works for them. It turns out then that mineral content (measured by hardness scales like GH and KH) is the real issue for fish, not pH. pH is simply a *secondary* number as far as mineral content goes and it is often moved around by hardness.
In fact its Carbonate Hardness (measured by KH (actually in our hobby, the KH kits really measure total alkalinity because its pretty much the same as carbonate hardness in our situation)) that is the measure of how pH is going to be moved around. KH is commonly used to tell us how much "buffer" our water has. When KH is high, the pH won't move much. When KH is low, pH is subject to unexpected moves. If there is a downward force on pH such as a tank that is cycling, as KH drops below 4 degrees, we know the pH is at risk of dropping. So its KH, not GH (general hardness) that is really cared about in conjunction with pH.
I'm not a true expert on any particular species of fish, so I will defer to others on whether one would actually make the reluctant choice to alter ones homebase water to accomodate the fish. But I can say that -usually- we all try to avoid doing that, if we're experienced. I hope my little post here will give you a little reference you can come back to as you're learning more about the relationships between pH, KH and GH and the real needs of your fish!
~~waterdrop~~
