Best Substrate for a Malawi Tank

I was wondering if using aragonite to buffer you water would cause the pH and hardness to swing when you do waterchanges? The way I see it, the aragonite will leach into the water slowly, and the pH will gradually rise. When you do a waterchange, half of the water that was up to around 8.0 will drop again to somewhere between your tap water's pH and that of the tank.

Am I right?
 
Probably. Alot of Rift Lake keepers add cichlid buffers to their water so that the water going in is the same gh and ph as the water they're taking out. I only keep one rift tank, and have never messed with additives. tank ph is 8.0 and wc water is 7.2. I do 25% weekly and I hve never had a problem. These fish are wildcaught Tangs (by all accounts sensitive to water quality and chemistry) but they show no stress and spawn continuously. I figure if it ain't broken, don't fix it.
 
I've used a 50-50 combination of the Caribe Sea cichlid "gravel" and crushed coral in all my rift lake tanks (2 - 125G's, 120G, 2 - 75G's) for the past 7 or 8 years and they remain very stable even with large (40-50% in the Malawi tanks) water changes (I don't change more than 20% in my tangynikan tank). Great natural look and cleans easily. I'm actually able to keep pl*cos and clown loaches in the "tang" tank as well.
 
Can someone post some pics of their Dark gravel/sand. Im thinking of going black or a mix of black/white on my next setup.
I have some crushed coral but i think want the darker look.
 
~*LuvMyKribs*~ said:
I have very natural sand in my tanks that I collected from local rivers and beaches. Helps the fish stand out against a natural background, which looks awesome.
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Wow... thats a lot of work.
 
Not really! The fact that its free makes up for the extra work... but really it wasnt that much more work. With store bought sand you need to go to the store, put it in the car, rinse it, and put it in the tank. With the river sand you go to the river, put it in buckets, into the car, rinse it, then put it in the tank. Voila! :D ;)

Grayfish said:
Can someone post some pics of their Dark gravel/sand. Im thinking of going black or a mix of black/white on my next setup.
I have some crushed coral but i think want the darker look.
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Visit http://www.malawimayhem.com and look through thier tank gallery. They have TONS of malawi setups, many with dark sand so you can get an idea of what it looks like.

:)
-Diana
 
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