Never under estimate the power of pH fluctuation and Discus

Hello @oupoot,

I do put an air stone in the maturing water, yes.

I must be honest, with the air stone and heater in a bucket of tap water, where I have only added Prime, after 24 hours there is very little change to the pH, so I understand why @Dirk states it is actually mainly for the chlorine, I have tried and tested it, and am going to make double sure this evening, when my second bucket of water has been sitting maturing for 24 hours...

I would still like to understand if the Prime works instantly or not, to wrap my head around this maturing of the water... I also still want to know why we do not test for chlorine when its such a big deal...

Lots to learn!

Kind regards,
Candice

 

As far as I know this is how they communicate with each other in terms of dominance, I find with the rest that I still have there are 2 that are the biggest out of the lot that never show there vertical baring and are the more dominant of the lot so they do not feel the need to show the lines as they are king. I notice this as well when I am feeding them, the smaller ones will instantly darken (and I mean in the blink of an eye) to show some sort of aggression towards the bigger fish so they can get a bit to eat. As they finish the food they go back to their normal colour.

 

Is this your first batch of discus ? You do know that everyone who keeps discus wipes their tanks atleast once, like part of the learning process, sad but true !

 

Hi Candice,

To get back to this question:

A chemical buffer does exactly what the name implies, it buffers the pH both from going up too high AND from going too low. So the Discus buffer will do both things, stabilize the tapwater from having a too high pH and will also stop your water from having a too low pH if you feed your fishes strongly which is what you actually want to do. Adding shells to your filter is also a buffer of sorts but it has the advantage that it is not dissolved in the water. What actually happens is that the carbonate of the shells, chemical formula CO3= will react with the acid, H+, and from bicarbonate, HCO3-, so this is taking the free H+ ions out of the water and thereby not allowing the pH to drop. What you actually will find is that the shells will be corroded away by the acid, they get less and less quite quickly and you then have to add more new shells again.

Then I also want to get back to what Jason mentioned with regard to adding bicarb which is what you can also do to specifically get the pH up quickly (always done whilst using an accurate pH meter and always not increasing the pH by more than one pH unitin 24 hours). Bicarbonate, HCO3-, will react with acid, H+ to form H2CO3 which will then convert to carbon dioxide gas, CO2, and water, H2O, thereby effectively reducing the amount of free H+ and thereby causing the pH to go up. I use a combination of shells and bicarb. I have a certain amount of shells in my filters and then I watch the pH all the time and if I see it is getting too low, I add bicarb to bring up the pH.

In a setup in which you want to breed discus, you cannot use Discus buffers because this hardens the water too much and but then you can use the shells and bicarb approach to stop the pH from dropping too low.

And Popgun, discus are not really finicky fishes, you just have to know your water chemistry, there is nothing wrong with the fishes, it is us humans pushing the limits of keeping fishes in aquaria under soft water conditions that is the problem.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

Hi Jason,

I should have spoken to you about it before, its been worrying me and now it makes perfect sense lol!

I also have one dominant one, that is the biggest and also doesn't show the vertical bars. They are colouring up nicely in terms of their faces and the red trim on their fins, I think that they are going to be beautiful fish

Kind regards,
Candice

 

Hi @Dirk,

Thank you, that's a great explanation, now I understand much better. I find this is very interesting! So reducing the H+ ions is the part that makes the water harder - making it less acidic - more acidic is softer (more H+ ions) and less acidic is harder (less H+ ions) right? Which makes perfect sense considering the meaning of pH - pH is a measure of the activity of the hydrogen ion.

Next I want to learn all about kH and gH.

Can you please tell me the answers to the chlorine questions when you have a moment? Thank you

Kind regards,
Candice

 

Wow @Singularity, that statement sure puts a damper on things...

I sincerely hope that you saying 'everyone' is an exageration, I would shudder to think that I am going to do that at some point

This is my first group of babies I am raising, otherwise I have only been keeping bigger Discus for almost a year (not very long I know). I have had challenges along the way, but thanks to the guidance and advice from Discus keeping TASA members, I have not had any fatalaties as yet and I'd like to keep it that way if it's up to me. I am only human though and time will tell.

Kind regards,
Candice

 

Hi Candice,

THis water chemistry is not so easy to understand and I fear you have come to a conclusion that is incorrect.

Many aquarists have this idea that low pH means soft water and high pH means hard water.

If water is said to be soft it contains very low levels of dissolved substances. Hard water contains high levels of dissolved substances.

Acidity or alkalinity only has to do with the concentration of H+ ions or OH- ions. At low pH you have a high concentration of H+ ions and at a high pH you have a very low concentration of H+ ions, but this has nothing to do with total amount of other substances dissolved in the water.

For this reason you can have water that has a lot of dissolved substances in it and is therefore hard, but can still have a high H+ concentration and a low pH and is therefore acid. You can also have water that has very little dissolved substances in it and is therefore soft but has a low concentration of H+ ions and is therefore less acidic and therfore has a higher pH.

Not so easy to understand, all this chemistry!

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

Hi @Dirk,

Ok so the statement above means that the Discus buffers will create more dissolved substances in the water making it hard, but won't affect the pH (that is then separate)... I think this is where I lost the plot... :unsure: Then do we use gH to measure if the water is hard or soft and is this the same thing in terms of dissolved substances in the water?

Thanks for clearing that up, I agree, this chemistry stuff certainly isn't easy to understand! I am just going to keep trying though, hopefully eventually I will get the basics of it at least lol

Kind regards,
Candice

 

@Dirk Sorry for chipping in, but I have a question about my water, which has reference to @Aqua pH discussion.

My water parameters are as follows:
pH = 8.0, gH = 5, kH = 4

I have managed to soften my water (originally gH = 10, kH = 8) over the last 2 months, but I am still having difficulty to get the pH down. My target pH would be 7.0. Would the use of acid and alkaline buffers (Seachem's) safely lower my pH.

 

@Neels

I recommend you start a new thread and explain what tank, filtration, fish, feeding regime, water changes etc etc you are doing and lets discuss your issues there in detail.

regards

Andrew

 

OK Candice,

Almost there as far as understanding this all.

The buffer components will be dissolved in the water so they add to the hardness or total dissolved substances in the water, that is quite correct. However, in this instance, because they are at the same time buffer components, they DO influence the pH and they actually stabilize the pH. So in this instance, although these substances contribute to the hardness they also DO have an influence on the pH reading.

Why I was also careful to write "total dissolved substances" at the start of the previous paragraph, is because as far as the term "hardness" goes, this is by definition subdivided into two types of hardness called "general hardness" or gH and this refers to the sum of the amount of Calcium and Magnesium in the water, and the "carbonate hardness" or kH which is the sum of the amount of carbonate and bicarbonate in the water. Calcium and Magnesium have no influence in pH, but carbonate and bicarbonate do. If you add carbonate and bicarbonate the pH will go up. So to get to my statement in the previous mail, you can add say Calcium Chloride and Magnesium Chloride salts to water and the general hardness or gH will go up, but this will not add carbonate hardness or kH and it will not change the pH. However, if you add Calcium carbonate and Magnesium carbonate, then both your general hardness and your carbonate hardness go up and this is actually what causes all the confusion because both your gH and kH will go up and then your pH will go up as well. I want to add one more thing though, and that is you can add sodium chloride or plain old salt to water, and because this does not add Calcium or magnesium or carbonate or bicarbonate to the water, the gH and the kH will not go up, BUT, the total amount of dissolved substances WILL go up. Discus do not want a large amount of dissolved substances in the water that you keep them, not gH or kH or other dissolved substances such as salt either. For breeding all of these dissolved substances must be low.

Andrew, Neels does touch on a perhaps relevant point as he is trying to understand the other extreme, he has too high gH and kH for his tank. Neels, kH buffers the water against drops in pH. We have too little kH in the water here in the Cape and that is why Candice had the pH crash in the first place. Literally the acid produced by the breakdown of the ammonia produced by her fishes in her biological filter reacted with all the available carbonate hardness and then the pH just dropped further and further. Your water contains so much kH or carbonate with that high kH value that you can add a lot of acid to it and the carbonate just continues to react with it and because there is so much, it does not get used up and so the pH just simply does not drop, we could say it is buffered against the drop in pH. In order to get it to drop, you must either add one hell of a lot of acid, or you must remove the carbonate. This can be done by peat filtration, and this is what you read about in the discus books all the time. This applies to water conditions in Europe where most regions have water with high gH and kH values, and also in Bloemfontein and some other inland areas of SA, but certainly not to Cape Town and other areas which have soft water. If you use peat filtration in Cape Town for example the pH of your water will rapidly drop well below 4 and your fish will DIE, it is completely the opposite of what all the books write!

At some time I am going to write a book about this all because these questions crop up time and time again and I have explained them time and time again. The English books just don't explain this properly, but there are a few books in German which do and which I was fortunate to get when I started out. One is a book by Professor Rolf Geisler written in the late nineteen sixties (he actually passed away earlier this year) in which he explains the effects of peat filtration on the pH of water that contains carbonate (Prof Geisler was a good friend of Dr Schmidt-Focke the big discus breeder, are you starting to see the connections folks). These are his graphs, the first of which would show the effects of filtering quite hard water over peat three times. What you see is that the peat filtration will remove carbonate hardness and so the carbonate hardness goes down and so also the pH. When you stop the peat filtration the pH stabilizes as a new equilibrium between the carbonate hardness and pH is established and then with the second and third filtration over peat the carbonate hardness and pH go down slowly but surely.



Torffilterung = peat filtration; Karbonathärte = carbonate hardness

Now in the next graph, he shows if you repeat this three times peat filtration with water that is softer to start off with and you can see he indicates the final pH crash with a large exclamation mark!!!!! meaning pH crash as in Candice's tanks!!!!!! Problem was that Candice did not even use peat, but the Cape Town water contains a kH content of about 0.5 and the drop in pH caused by Candice's fishes was enough to drop the pH through the floor.



So Neels, you can filter over peat to reduce the kH and the pH, but don't blame me if you overdo it and then have a pH crash. What the peat filtration will however NOT do is remove the gH and you can therefore eventually end up with hard water which has a low pH, which is what I explained to you earlier this morning Candice!

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

Thank you @Dirk, for all the explanations :top:. I certainly have a much better understanding now and I am sure @Neels does too.

I put the crushed coral (I had some left over) into the canister today, only 1/4 cup and will monitor it to see how it affects the pH drops, I am using the buffer only in new water when doing water changes and only in the babies tank as I don't have the pH issue in the bigger tank

I look forward to reading your book one day! :bigsmile:

Kind regards,
Candice

 

Ok, update time on the pH and using the crushed coral
All I can say is BRILLIANT! arty2:

My pH has been stable, and I mean to a T, for 24 hours straight! it went from dropping 1+ unit every day by the time evening came and I did my small wc... to tonight, where the pH was still at 6.4 exactly (the same as it was last night after doing my wc)! aaaaand after the wc this evening, and using the discus buffer in the new water, guess what?! it was ....drum roll please.... 6.4 on the dot!

I'm a very happy camper! Thanks @Dirk for teaching me about the pH and what to do and @pHish_man who originally diagnosed the problem, you guys are amazing! :adore:

Kind regards,
Candice