Substrate and more

[TO KYO]

1. Does fluorite substrate affects your ph,gh, and kh?
2. Is fluorite anywhere near as good as fluval?
3. Does lower/increasing your ph affects your kh and gh? How are those 3 related?
What’s lowest gh and kh mollies can handle?

 

[Essjay]

I have no idea about #1 and #2

The lowest GH mollies can live comfortably with is 15 dH/250 ppm. KH is not directly important to fish; it stabilises pH, and stable pH is important. Changing pH will not affect GH.
GH is simply the amount of calcium and magnesium in the water. To alter GH you have to add calcium and magnesium or dilute the amounts with pure water such as RO.
KH is the amount of carbonate and bicarbonate in the water. Again you can increase it by adding more. Adding acid will remove it as carbonates react with acids. In fish tanks, a lot of waste products are acidic, and KH stops them causing the pH to lower. The higher the KH, the harder it is to change pH.

Using bottles of pH altering chemicals is not advisable as these add more things to the water. If you need to make water harder to keep mollies, you need to add more of the salts found naturally in hard water. The simplest way to do this is to add something like Rift Lake salts or remineralisation salts of the kind used to add to RO water. But you would have to add these salts to the new water at every water change at exactly the same amount to keep the amount in the tank constant.

 

[Jan Cavalieri]

Florite substrate doesn't alter anything in the water - just make sure you rinse it and rinse it and rinse it. The "dark" is actually kind of an ugly brown - so I recommend the black. Again, rinse it to death. Use a colander with fairly small holes. If you get the sand you'll need to get a fine mesh colander to get rid of the sludge in the sand. I've never used Fluval but I'm sure it's fine as well. Just remember to rinse it to death or you'll have a very cloudy tank that will take a number of water changes to get rid of. It's far easier to take care of it ahead of time then deal with a mess in your tank.

I don't worry too much about KH and GH because they are very difficult to alter. Test your tank, look up what is the range your fish need and if it fits in the range then get the fish. I've got fish that should have slightly higher or lower GH or KH but have never had any problem. The issue becomes keeping the PH stable. I DO use chemicals (PH up and PH down) to alter the Ph in my tanks because I can't easily do much about KH and GH. The water in my city averages a PH of 9.9 - WAY to high for my tropical fish, so I do use PH down. I have 29 gallon tanks and depending on the PH reading I add either 2.5 mls or 5.0 mls of PH down. I typically have to do this after every large water change. Depending on your KH/GH you may get a rebound for a few days because of all the extra hydrogen ions in the water. I just add another small amount (like 2.5 or less) and it keeps the PH in check. I know I'll get a lot of criticism for this and of course you're adding more chemicals to your water but a PH of 9.9 would kill my fish so I don't have much of an option and nobody has offered any better suggestions.

So go to Liveaquaria.com and look up the fish you are interested in purchasing and it will list the water temperature, PH, and KH values needed for that fish. You can then buy it locally or online (I buy my fish online because they have a huge variety and a lot of good information and they are generally very healthy but the shipping cost can run as high as $40 - they put the fish in a Styrofoam cooler with a heat pack or cold pack depending on the weather and they ship overnight. I have had such bad luck purchasing fish locally - that's when I started buying online). But if you have a really good local fish store then certainly purchase locally and you'll save a ton of money. Oh - and Wikipedia also has great information on most species of fish so double check the statistics there against the ones at Liveaquaria.com - I once purchased 3 albino cory's and all the stat's added up perfectly with my water stat's - but when I added them to my tank all three died within an hour - they were active fish in the bag but just died in my tank - my only explanation is that the stat's on the website were all wrong. In any case, the company gave me a store credit for the dead cory's. That's about the only bad experience I've had with online fish purchases. AZgardens.com is another website - but a little more pricey -they do have an awesome selection of plants (they started as a aquarium plant company) and I've bought most of my plants there - all super healthy. Their fish selection is awesome too - but expensive - they are consultants and suppliers to large companies including NASA.

 

[Byron]

1. Does fluorite substrate affects your ph,gh, and kh?

I had Flourite black for two years in my 70g and I did not notice much if any change. I also have zero GH/KH so this would make it easier for changes to the pH, and it may have slightly affected it, but for all intents and purposes, no.

2. Is fluorite anywhere near as good as fluval?

I've no idea so to the benefit of Fluval, but Flourite is a complete waste of money. I had to use liquid and substrate fertilizers exactly the same as I had been with sand in the tank, so the plants gained no benefit I could see from flourite. Others have said much the same thing, and it applies to Eco-Complete as well. Personally I wouldnot spend money for any of these so-called plant substrates; if the tank is intended to be a natural or low-tech, there is certainly no benefit, and they can be rough for substrate fish. I had to remove the cories after they developed significant mouth and barbel degeneration; fortunately they recovered over sand and I still have them some 8 years since that disaster. Waste of money. I tore the tank down and the Flourite was dumped in a hole in the back yard. The same plants have thrived just as well with play sand.

3. Does lower/increasing your ph affects your kh and gh? How are those 3 related?

Essjay answered this, I will just add a bit. The GH/KH along with CO2 determines the pH. You cannot safely adjust pH without dealing with the GH/KH, depending upon the values initially. And as GH is the more significant, that is what you should deal with and the KH and pH will basically "follow suit."

What’s lowest gh and kh mollies can handle?

The GH should be no lower than 15 dGH (= 268 ppm). With such a GH the pH will be above 7 and the KH will be proportionally high as well.