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GH KH which one more important?
Many water systems add some sort of hydroxide (alkaline) to reduce corrosion. Mine adds sodium hydroxide. The tap is 8.9+ but drops rapidly once out of the tap. Aging the water generally will help. yeah. straight out it is like 8.2.. after two days aging, it's like 7.8... As for adjusting kH without affecting pH, the answer is no. Up the kH the pH goes up, unless you add CO2 to balance the pH. You can also use an acid buffer to drop the pH while raising the kH. so.. add kH increase chemical, and also put in pH down or something? does this mean people stop CO2 during the night? wouldn't it over-compensate by producing too much CO2? I guess one way to fix this is get a peumatically actuated air intake valve that is timed so that when the lights go off, it will turn on venturi in the tank, to bubble out CO2? sigh. I guess I have too much plant for my tank and water condition, I guess :-( Out of curiosity, does your pH tend to drop consistently between water changes? In my Pre-CO2 tanks the kH and pH would slowly drift down over time, actually it still does. well, this is a hard question to answer... mainly because my tank seems to experience quite a bit of pH fluctuation over the course of the day. 1. when the tank was much newer (yes.. my tank is about 4-5mo, so..it's still pretty new), the pH seemed to stay pretty stable around 7.6-7.8. very alkaline, and the water was more yellow due to all the tannin leeched by the bogwood. also the water was always slightly cloudy (this was true even without the plants). stale water out of the tap is about 7.8, so I guess this made sense. 2. now the pH drifts between 7.0 and 7.5 (7.5 at night, 7.0 in the morning) probably due to plants eating up CO2. water is almost clear (no yellow), and very very little haze.. (you can only see the haze at night with no ambient light). 3. ever since I noticed this inter-day pH drift/cycle, I have not seen my water go above 7.6... yet... and I just did a 50% water change.. and within two days, it's back to 7.0-7.5 daily pH drift... (yes.. poor fish).. I don't use any activated carbon, so I guess the tannin was just water-changed-out over time... my water change is on the order of once in 1.5 weeks, about 25% (NetMax warned me that since the tap pH is high, and KH/GH is low, if I lapse on my water change the pH differential may become so large it may be bad for fish.. not to mention potential pH crash due to limited buffering capability). at any rate, right before my 50% water change, the water pH cycle was 7.0-7.4 or so.. now it's like 7.0-7.5.. so I guess you can say it is slightly higher.. but not noticably higher for the amount of water that got changed out. (value between 7.2 and 7.6 is like a guessing game anyway) the overall drop in the pH may be because I've started to add some plant nutrients (Flourish, flourish excel, flourish iron. my swords started to look downright pale, and new anubias leaf was almost white! now its all nice and green..)... so it's possible the plants are all of a sudden doing so well that it's depeleting CO2 to quickly compensate the pH differential.. or whatever.. (I'm brainstorming here). linda |
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