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RO Water and pH readings

Your tank will always rise and then drop with water change it's a fact of a fertilised tank and don't believe it's a huge problem....
My Taiwan bee tanks goes from 170 to 230, WC with 50 to get it back to 170ish no issues with sensitive shrimp.
Asian dreams goes as high as 250 from a 150 base, WC 50% with pure RO then add minerals back to 150ish.
Now I'm sure someone will say this may be bad practice but in honesty I think most scapers that use RO will attest to the same thing... Id also add that all livestock in all my tanks are happiest just after the sudden drop at WC.... And the barbs love a temp drop to get a bit of sparing going :)


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I have to agree with your suggestion on temperature drop and I suppose its all to do with moderation. When I do a water change the water that goes in tends to be maybe a degree less than the tank and the fish seem to love this and come up and swim in the stream of fresh water going in. I suppose if you poured a 10 gallon barrel of water 2 degrees cooler in one go you wouldn't have very happy fish! Doesn't a change in temp often help spawning in some species?

I guess the way I changed my water previous to now also caused the same effect where too much changed too quickly. Changing 10 Gallons of water with a TDS of 100pps into a tank with upwards of 300ppm in one go was probably the cause of the fish deaths in my case. Only time will tell, I suspected overdosing of EasyCarbo was also the cause of death so for the time being this has been suspended.
 
Hi all,
sonicninja said:
I suppose if you poured a 10 gallon barrel of water 2 degrees cooler in one go you wouldn't have very happy fish! Doesn't a change in temp often help spawning in some species?
I guess the way I changed my water previous to now also caused the same effect where too much changed too quickly. Changing 10 Gallons of water with a TDS of 100pps into a tank with upwards of 300ppm in one go was probably the cause of the fish deaths in my case.
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I must admit I remain a bit of a sceptic. I've noticed that the fish swim through the stream of water when I top the tank water up with water out of the water butt, and I know they do this because there are Daphnia in the water butt water. Marbled Hatchets and Splash Tetra become particularly excited and will often station themselves right in the flow of cool water.

Now I make some effort to warm the water up, but it will often be at least 5oC cooler, and you can see the stream cool water sinking. It will also be a softer than the tank water, and may well have a different pH. None of these seems to bother the fish.

I think a particular problem is often that pH crash and fish death occur together, and people make the obvious correlation between the two, but they are both symptoms of the underlying problem, not cause and effect.

cheers Darrel
 
If you don't believe in osmotic shock or that sudden change of water stats cause any effect on fish, then I urge you to test it on your fish first with a nice 50-60% large water change with remineralised RO water to stats totally different of the tank for a period of a few weeks(presuming the fish make it or don't get sick) and then claim it doesn't matter.
I too don't believe you can outright kill fish but I think the response would be weakened immune systems and disease outbreaks.

The examples given here are always about altering ph with CO2, or altering by slowly dripping the water over hours, or adding weak acids like a few alder cones/leaves, or topping up tanks with water every so often, or doing rather small water changes to start with.
 
Hi all,
sciencefiction said:
If you don't believe in osmotic shock or that sudden change of water stats cause any effect on fish, then I urge you to test it on your fish first with a nice 50-60% large water change with remineralised RO water to stats totally different of the tank for a period of a few weeks(presuming the fish make it or don't get sick) and then claim it doesn't matter.
Click to expand...
No I'm not claiming it doesn't matter, if you keep fish from ancient, warm, stable carbonate buffered systems (like Lake Tanganyika) they have very pretty specific requirements, and if you deviate far from them you will kill your fish either slowly, or quickly.

Because these systems are heavily buffered it takes a large addition of acids to change the pH, and this is one of the problems.

People extrapolate from their (entirely valid) experience of hard buffered water, and you get "pH changes kill fish" etc. and they do, but only in certain circumstances.

Fish that are easy to keep generally have a wide range of tolerances, which means that as long as you have a reasonable level of aeration etc they tend to remain alive.

"Difficult to keep fish" are difficult to keep because they have at least one factor that needs to be maintained with narrow tolerances. It maybe as simple as requiring high levels of oxygenation, but even this fundamental requirement can become more problematic if it is combined with a need for high temperatures. If you then have a fish that is large, has a specialised vegetarian diet and shows high levels of intra-specific aggression you have a recipe for a "difficult to keep fish". The one I had in mind was Baryancistrus spp. which are frequently imported but few people keep alive for very long, and they are virtually never bred in captivity.

cheers Darrel
 
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