No seashells in tank?

[F.sparverius]

I wonder if my cocina rocks and seashells would cause any problems with my tank. Thus far they have not. Our water is very soft however and a few more calcium ions floating about the water probably would not hurt.....would it?

[blitzen25bm]

have you had them in there long? harder water will keep your ph more stable but you dont want it too high. i think it should be fine if theres a couple pieces but you wouldn't want your whole substrate to be made of it unless your keeping africans or going saltwater.

[JSchmidt]

The more acidic your water (acidic water generally tends to have lower carbonate hardness or KH), the fast things like shells, crushed coral, etc, will dissolve. As the shells dissolve, KH increase and with it, pH. Will it dissolve fast enough to dramatically change your water's hardness and pH? Hard to say, but I'd be checking pretty regularly over a number of months just to be safe.

Good luck,
Jim

[F.sparverius]

Our water is zero grains hardness...which would be acidic? I don't actually have a PH test kit to test the tank water though. I might swipe a few of the paper indicators from the lab at school.

The substrate is some sort of nonreactive rock, at least it said it was non reactive on the bag. It actually looks like smashed up quartz.

[Dapple2]

You probably ought to check both your pH and Kh just to keep tabs on it. I use plenty of shells in my water for buffering purposes myself, our pH is7 and our gh and kh are both atabout one, so the pH tends to quickly slide to around 5 otherwise. In my water I can actually see the shells dissolving as the weeks progress, they typically only last a few months.