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Ph profile

Ivan Stoyanov

Member
Joined
13 Jun 2019
Messages
82
Location
Burgas
Hi,

Can someone help with my ph profile?
Kh 6-7
Tap water - 7.8 ph
Aquarium water, before co2 start - 7.2 ph
Ph at light start - 6.7, when I go under 6.6 ph fishies are not in good shape.
Is this ok or I must up co2, I'm using eheim skimmer 24/7 and around 16x flow in aquarium.
 
Last edited:
Assuming your kH is approx. 7 and pH is 6.7 that gives approx 40ppm of CO2 - that's way too much that your plants need, I think that you can keep it at 20ppm.
 
I post this because I have only 0.5 point drop from aquarium water, but my tap is more. Not sure why tap and aquarium water has different ph, before co2 starts.
 
Hi,

Can someone help with my ph profile?
Kh 6-7
Tap water - 7.8 ph
Aquarium water, before co2 start - 7.2 ph
Ph at light start - 6.7, when I go under 6.6 ph fishies are not in good shape.
Is this ok or I must up co2, I'm using eheim skimmer 24/7 and around 16x flow in aquarium.

Something doesn't sound right here. Is the tap water ph 7.8 when it comes out the tap? Have you tested the tap water PH after being left in a cup/glass for 24h?

Tap water has a lot of dissolved o2 and co2 that's basically why plants pearl after water change. From what i understand usually if your PH is 7.8 straight out the tap, after 24h it would read somewhere around PH 8.4 that's because the dissolved co2 in tap water gasses off and the PH goes up, just like when we inject co2.

So if you don't know your degassed tap water PH reading, technically you could be at 1.5+ PH drop.

For instance my tap water comes out as:

PH 7.2/3

Degassed for 24h:
PH 7.8/9

During co2:
PH 6.9

Drop checker very lime green
 
I have found the cheap PH pens to become uncalibrated pretty quickly, especially with regular use. Mine was off by a lot compared to the little more expensive one even when calibrated at the same time.

I use to calibrate the cheap yellow ones off amazon weekly as they definitely were not accurate or reliable. Only good thing is that you can check if your co2 is stable during photoperiod, but you may not know your true pH unless calibrated and used.
 
I have and drop checker, just to be more sure.
But if he is accurate drop to 6.7 ph must be ok?
 
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