A standard water softener (salt based) will reduce you GH markedly, and increase your TDS (total dissolved solids). The KH effect will be small usually.
Ph problem...
- Thread starter Xielos
- Start date
patoloco said:
Just to clarify this a little further, nitrogen cycle dosn't exactly eat KH, what occurs is as a bi-product of the nitrogen cycle nitric acid is produced and subsequently binds to the available buffers in the tank, when the buffers have been completely used the ph will then begin to lower due to the nitric acide still being produced.
I can see where indiginess is comming from with his suggestion. Meaning that a water change is not neccessary to protect the bacteria from a ph crash, but I have to agree with RTR when he says that we should be trying to keep our water chemistry as close to the source water as possible, and this will be done by doing regular water changes. Now if this is done buffers will be replenished before they are used up and TDS will kept in check. So I guess the question is which is the prefered method? IMO in a low buffered tank regular water changes will be suffcient to replenish buffers if the tank is not overstocked,the other thing to keep in mind as RTR said is that reducing TDS instead of adding to the TDS will always be the prefered method of choice. Obviously there are exceptions to the rule like when experimenting with different things, but 9 times out 10 this not the case.
