Ph Issues

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coldcazzie

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Right, a while ago I discovered I was having pH issues with my Juwel Rio 240 - pH was very low. The thread about it is here:

http://www.fishforums.net/index.php?showto...p;#entry2518264

I did daily water changes to bring pH up. Part way through this I cleaned the filter and somehow sent the tank into a mini cycle, which also required daily water changes, and since that finished I've been doing weekly changes of about 30% ish, with gravel cleaning and also cleaning algae off etc - normal weekly tank maintainance.

Last week I didn't test, but today when I tested these were my results:

Ammonia: 0ppm. Nitrite: 0ppm. Nitrate: 10ppm. pH: 6.0.

Now I've only got 2 angels in there at the moment, and I know they are not adverse to soft acidic water (my KH and GH are both quite low), but I'm quite concerned as to why the pH has dropped right back down to 6, when my tap water tests at 7.4 and I am cleaning the tank/water changing on a weekly basis...I know pH can drop as a result of a build up of nitrates, but they are not exactly high. There's no bogwood in there, all decor is fake except for gravel and stones and these are all from lfs.

I feel like it's something really simple that I'm missing.

Is it perhaps because my KH and GH are low that's making the pH drop?
 
If I remember correctly, you have very soft water Cazzie. That means that your choices are to use something to buffer the water in the tank or accept the fact that tank water will end up with a low pH fairly quickly. If I had your water instead of mine I could keep almost any fish. If all that you have are soft water low pH fish, enjoy the low pH and let the fish enjoy it too. Keep doing frequent large water changes every week to keep things from going too far and you will be alright. If you end up wanting fish that need a bit higher pH than your 6.0, you will need to buffer the water. The easiest and most stable way to do that is by adding a calcium carbonate source to the filter flow path. The most common calcium carbonate source used is crushed coral or crushed shells. Those are sold at the LFS as substrate material for saltwater fish and will be called sand with a saltwater only label on it. Look closely at that sand and you will see what I mean by it being mostly crushed shell. It does not take much crushed shell to treat a fairly good sized tank because it dissolves readily in low pH water but does not dissolve well in higher pH water. A very large amount of crushed shell will move your pH to as much as about 7.8 to 8.0 so don't go overboard with it.
 
Right, I will keep the crushed shell/coral thing in mind just in case.

Is it worth maybe leaving some tap water out for a few days to see if the pH in it drops? Because if it does it would make me feel better that I'm not doing something wrong in my tank, it's just the soft water.

After the water change I did yesterday the pH was up to 6.8 - I'm assuming the change won't harm my fish because presumably a similar thing would happen in the wild when there was a large rainfall?

On a slightly different note - should I extend the amount of time I acclimate new fish for? I've always taken at least an hour to do it before, but should I maybe make it even longer at 3-4 hours to make sure the pH change doesn't shock them. I'm thinking more along the lines of if the lfs has a different pH which they have been in for a while, then a quick drop might shock them?

I guess the other option is that I buffer the QT to the pH in the lfs tanks, and then somehow slowly lower the pH in the QT until it matches my Rio, and then move the fish? I have no idea how I would do that though... unless I start with 100% new water (at 7.4pH where the tap water is) and wait for the pH to drop by it self to match the Rio, and then move the fish. Presumably that would be a slow enough drop for the fish not to be too bothered?

Are BNs and zebra loaches alright with low pH? Cuz if not I'll have to rethink my stocking, again!
 
I am fairly sure that the BNs are low pH, soft water fish. I have trouble keeping them healthy in my hard, high pH water. I have never looked into the loaches but the club member who keeps them goes to great length to soften her water by diluting it with RO in all her tanks, so my guess is that they also like low mineral content. Don't worry so much about pH. It is the mineral content of water that has the biggest effect on fish. If you somehow raised your pH without adding any mineral content, a nice trick that, your fish would hardly notice the difference. On the other hand, I do drop the mineral content of my tap water by mixing it with RO for one of my tanks and the pH stays the same as the tap water. After a little while in the tank, the water's pH drops because there is very little buffer in that tank. The fish don't seem to care about the pH. When I do a water change I use some 7.8 pH water mixed with fairly neutral water and the result is a high pH in the new water that I am adding. The fish ignore the rapid change from mid 6s to mid 7s but do not ignore it if I accidentally mix my blend too strong. With a high mineral content, they make their displeasure known very quickly by acting very stressed and not acting right. It is my clue to do another water change to straighten things out. I recognize that varying from tap water carries risks to the fish so I always keep an eye on them for a while after a water change just to be on the safe side. Imagine about 30 gallons of RO sitting around in bottles and buckets and you will have a decent picture of one aspect of my fish rooms. With my hard water, I always keep some RO on hand to use as needed.
 
OK, I'm going to chat about some of this in an attempt to come from a different angle because I agree with all the stuff OM has said and feel he's covered a lot of the most important things very well.

CC, thinking about your question of whether you are missing something really simple, I had the thought that perhaps you don't realize how normal what you're seeing is. You no doubt have tap water with low KH (I'll bet anything it would test out to 4 or below, probably far below) and when KH gets below 4, there's just not enough buffer to absorb the steady output of nitric acid that the normal tank process is putting out. So pH will inevitably drop.

So why don't you see much about this here on the forum? I think its partly that London and lots of the UK have pretty "hard" water, with no doubt plenty of KH. So for them and plenty of others the process you're seeing is just never a problem. They instead, at the most extreme, have the opposite situation as OM has described with the RO water stories.

The "soft water" situation you're describing is something you share with me and drobbyb and a few others on here. We have the other thing OM was describing, low mineral content leading to quickly dropping pH. In my case, my KH is zero or one degree out of the tap and my pH easily drops from 7.4 down through the 6's in a short period.

As described, we have a choice between "living with it" or "altering it." drobbyb and I live right close to this edge. In my case I choose (so far) to "live with it," meaning I do large 50% water changes weekly, which refreshes my tank with what little bit of mineral content my tap can give me and swings the pH back up towards 7.4. drobbyb has gone ahead and put "crushed coral" (CC... whoops, same as your initials) in a mesh bag in his filter and so enjoys the benefits of somewhat higher mineral content, higher pH and more stability. But he's really careful about it and has observed several times that he stays always aware that a lack of awareness could over-stress his fish from a fall back to tap-water normal. Personally, I have a whole bag of CC on hand just waiting in case I decide to go that way.

There's not "one best way" with this particular type of situation, just different sets of trade-offs, in my opinion. Its a topic I think about a lot because I have a gut feeling that some of my plants might do better in harder water, other things being equal and another trade-off is that the larger water changes cause my CO2 levels to fluctuate more widely, which can encourage BBA (black brush algae) and of course there are the fish out there that don't like my "amazonian acid" lol.

~~waterdrop~~
 
Imagine about 30 gallons of RO sitting around in bottles and buckets and you will have a decent picture of one aspect of my fish rooms.

Just the fact that you have whole rooms for fish is amazing to me! :) (there should be a jealous green smiley!)

What you're saying makes a lot of sense though. If I remember correctly (it's been a while since I tested) my KH is around 4 or 5 (depending on the day) and GH is not much higher. They are both very low - hard water is definitely not an issue I have. Will try to remember to test tonight and post them up - I find the API hardness kits very difficult to read so don't do it often.

I did also have an afterthought that it's probably not me, but the water - my best friend has a coldwater tank and her pH stubbornly sticks at 6.4 regardless of what she does with the water.

If possible I don't want to have to resort to buffering the tank - I'd rather just find a way for the fish to be happy in the water I have (or only to get fish that will be happy in the water I have).

I guess the thing that worries me is that I've had so many issues with introducing new fish that I'm searching for a reason, and pH seemed like it might be one. But since joining I've learned quite a lot and I'm now thinking its not (esp if low pH is caused by low KH/GH as that is a county-wide thing, not specific to me), but that still leaves me with fish-introduction-issues and no reason for them...which is one reason why I've gone to the trouble of setting up the QT in the first place: to see if it's an issue with my Rio, or just something that I'm doing wrong in general.
 
With a KH of 4, more frequent waterchanges may be the answer. If you test often, you can get a feel for how long it takes your pH to crash, and instead of letting it crash, simply do a large waterchange. It will be more work for you, but better for the fish in the long run.

As OM has said, the pH dosen't matter all that much. Fish can adapt and be acclimated to almost anyone's water if done slow enough.
 
Right, I will keep that in mind as another option, although currently not a feasible one due to the impending baby.

I guess I'll have to change the way I acclimatise the fish - what method do you guys use? I used to float the bag for half an hour with the lights off, then add small amounts of water about every 15 minutes for at least an hr before releasing into the tank. Leave the lights off til the morning and not feed until following day too. Any pointers?
 
When I acclimate fish I use the drip method. What I do is take a small bucket and empty the contents of the fish bag into the bucket. I then take a peice of airline tubng and tie a loose knot in one end. I place the end without the knot into the tank and start the flow by sucking on the end with the knot. Once the siphon is going I tighten the knot until I have 2 to 3 drops a second. Every half hour I come back on take a cup (or more depending on the drip speed) of water out of the bucket. After a few hours of this I know that the fish are acclimated enough and I can safely introduce them to the tank.
 
What about temperature? Won't the fish get too cold sat in an unheated bucket for several hours?
 
That's a good question. I keep my house warm enough so that the temperature difference is minimal, but I can see where you are coming from. In that case I would take a cupful of water directly from the tank and place it in the bucket, and repeat that a few times in 5 minute intervals so as to match the temp as closely as I could.
 
Right, wouldn't doing it that way be too fast though? If you do that, you may as well just add the water straight to the bag while it's floating in the tank?!

Sorry, not trying to pick, just don't want any more dead fish on my hands!

What about floating the bag in the tank for a while to get the temp match, then put the bag in a poly box in an effort to keep the heat. The temp diff between my room and the tank is not great, but it's enough that the fish would be bothered by the temp drop in an unheated bag/bucket...

Do you acclimate fish when moving them from QT to main tank? Also, if you're using the drip method do you then, after a few hours, put all the water in the bucket straight in the tank with the fish, on the basis that by that point it's mostly the tank water anyway rather than the lfs water?

Apologies fo all the Qs! :blush:
 
It's ok. Asking questions is how you learn :) I guess I wasn't clear. When I said add the water to the bucket I should have said after they are acclimated. The fish will have adjusted to temperature in the bucket by the drip. It does it slow enough so the temp dosen't shock the fish. By that time you will have only the tank water in the bucket, so you can add a cupful every 5 minutes to adjust the temperature.

Does that make any sense?

I never add LFS water to my tanks. It's just too risky. I replace the water from the tank with fresh dechlorinated water. Kind of like a mini waterchange.
 
Right yes I understand what you mean now.

Will repeat this Q tho:

Do you acclimate fish when mvoing from your QT to main tank?
 
It's always a good idea to acclimate. Even though the water source is the same, the conditions in the two tanks probably aren't identical. I would do it just to be safe.
 

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