African Cichlid Mix or Rift Lake Authentic

[yk387]

"That Fish Place" offers:
1) Rift Lale Authentic
2) African Cichlid Mix
3) African Ivory Coast Gravel

I am starting 46 bow front tank with Malawi cichlids. All 3 products looks to me more atractive than just crushed coral. Any opinions which would be better? All of them is said to raise PH to 8.2+. Would that be a little on the high side or just perfect as far as PH goes?

African Cichlid Mix is just dark colored calcium, but Ivory Coast Gravel looks like real dark gravel and I like that one the best for looks. I already got some outstanding advices on filters, so I hope I will get some good insights on gravel topic as well.

P.S. My tap water PH is 7.6

Thanks.

[Luca Brazzi]

No matter which gravel you choose, you will have to add some chemistry to your tank to achieve the correct ph and hardness. None of the substrates will do it all for you.

8.2 pH for Africans is fine...

Theres an article on making your own reef lake buffers at www.cichlid-forum.com but I think its basically:

Take a 5 gallon bucket of dechlorinated tap water...

Starting with 1 Teaspoon, add enough baking soda to raise the Ph to the desired level (8.0, etc), record the amount used

Starting with 1 tablespoon, add enough epsom salt to raise hardness to the desired level. Record the amount

To this mix add 1 teaspoon of Aquarium salt.

You should now know how much of each ingredient to add per 5 gallons of water

Now... simply mix up a big batch of the stuff, and shake well.

Then... what I would add to this would be to then get a fresh 5 gallons or water... add tablespoons of your mix until the hardness is correct... (record this amount)

The ph should be now be correct too, if you mixed things together well...

You know know how much of your mix to add / 5 gallons.

I think that making your own mix is a better choice since you can custom taylor the chemistry to suit your tap water.

[Jayhawk]

Personally, I'd just go with one of the gravels which will raise your pH a bit. Messing with water chemistry is so often unnecessary unless your parameters are WAY off, and 7.6 pH is quite close.

Before anyone jumps up and says for rift lake cichlids you need buffers, etc. My water's natural pH is also 7.6, I have crushed coral gravel, and I had non-stop breeding Tanganyikans for several years. I'm currently playing with kribs, but none of my Tangs ever had a health problem (except for inter and intra species violence from time to time).

Eric

[Luca Brazzi]

Personally, I'd just go with one of the gravels which will raise your pH a bit. Messing with water chemistry is so often unnecessary unless your parameters are WAY off, and 7.6 pH is quite close.

What about hardness? pH is only one parameter... there are others that need to be in sync as well not just the pH.

Most of the folks who use Crushed Coral will tell you that substrate alone does not make your water perfect for Africans.

[JSchmidt]

I pretty much agree with Jayhawk, unless one is doing large-scale water changes (e.g., 50% or more). In that case, buffering substrates may not be enough to prevent pH swings as new water is added.

If you do go with the water doctoring route, you can probably get by using only baking soda (or some other form of carbonate or bicarbonate) and epsom salts. Aquarium salts may contain any number of things you might not need, and there is very little sodium chlorine in the Rift Lakes anyway.

Good luck,
Jim

[Faramir]

There's more sodium than you might imagine, IIRC. But not enough to consider the lakes saline in any way - http://www.malawicichlids.com/mw01011.htm

Be that as it may, I wonder about the Epsom salts thing. We are really fooling the test kit here - it measures Mg++ and Ca++. If our tap water is already hardish, then boosting GH with Mg++ is probably fine. But if it's really soft to begin with, we end up with water where almost the entire GH reading is made up of Mg++, which does not mirror the lake, although the GH is the same. Hence I do use commercial cichlid salts, but not the buffer, which appears to be glorified sodium bicarb (i.e. it's had the decimal point in the price moved a place to the right).

[Jayhawk]

Luca,

I agree that KH and GH (along with pH) are key for Rift lake cichlids, but it's pretty rare (unless your city strips KH and GH from your water) to have a natural pH of 7.6 without having decent KH and GH. My KH thanks to the city is only 1-2, but the GH is 12 or so. Crushed coral as a substrate raises my KH to 6 and my GH to 16 which was fine for my Tanganyikans. My nearest LFS does the same with their Malawians and they're doing great in the same conditions. Finally, everyone in my local fish club who keeps rift lake cichlids also just does the city water with crushed coral/argonite substrates and all of their Tangs and Malawians do fine in it.

Naturally, if you live somewhere with very soft, low pH water, all I'm saying is out the window!

Eric