Sydney Water

[yabby]

Hi there,

I live in Sydney and have recently set up a 20 gallon freshwater tropical tank. Unfortunately the tap water here seems to suffer from amazingly high pH, so high that my API testing kit cant even give even give a ballpark figure. Does anyone have the same problem and if so what do you do about it?

Cheers

 

[meguro]

Most sydney water is about 7.5-8.0 pH. What you can use to bring it down are things like pH down salts, peat or something like peat, additional CO2 and some drift/bog woods can supposedly lower pH slightly. Some of the dams have a far lower hardness than others, so manipulating the pH shouldn't be that difficult.

Apparently though most fish are quite tolerant of a large range of pH values. Otherwise you could always keep African rift lake fish.

useful links:
www.sydneywater.com.au/Publications/Reports/TypicalWaterAnalysis.pdf#Page=1
www.sydneywater.com.au/WaterQuality/QuarterlyDrinkingWaterQualityReport/QuarterlyMonitoringReport/3rdQuarter0809.pdf#Page=1
http/www.sydneywater.com.au/WaterQuality/

 

[saltynay]

7.5ph is average for most tropicals I would say, 8 is a bit on the high side but as stated you can add ornaments or mildly acidic chemicals to bring it back to neutral.

 

[DesperateDanio]

ok well i am not from sydney but my water here in reigate is a very stable but quite base 8.3 -8.0 i have danios (zebras) 2 rainbow fish mela something 2 otos 1 hyp something looks like a sailfin plec just 100 times smaller and 4 cherry barbs they all seem happy as larry in that pH so i think i would say buy a high range pH checker just to make out sure it is not like pure base lol. But i think general opinion is that a stable p.h is more crucial then a particular value unless breeding certain species. So maybe an idea to check the KH of the water as well because i am pretty sure this is the way to check how well your water will resist pH changes