Lost 12 fish
- Thread starter cap1384
- Start date
nguyendetecting
"Swim along with the snorks"
Kevin as long as you're not doing anything crazy like adding "PH UPPer" "Perfect PH in a bottle" type stuff in it I think you should be fine. There are lots of people here with home water softeners and they do ok. I think the main concern is if your tank was at 6.5 ph and you want say 7.8, and you added PH up for days on end trying to make it climb up, then yes that would be bad. Acclimate your fish and you should be fine.
Just a few thoughts...
Anyway you can use/add a spigot before your softener to fill your tanks with?
For cichlids you can use crushed coral and/or argonite sand as your substrate. It raises the PH and adds a lot of buffers to the water. The only thing is that it doesn't react instantly, so a massive water change can cause the PH to bounce. So you try to do smaller 10~15% changes verse 50%+ changes. And if it becomes needed to do a large change you can add baking soda to the water as a buffer to keep the PH high.
I use crushed coral and it took about 2 days for the PH to max out and level off. Since then normal water changes don't cause me much problem. If I do a larger water change the fish gasp an are unhappy for a while unless I add the baking soda dissolved in water as I fill it back up.
