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Freshwater pH Over-Buffered & Peat Moss


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My SW->FW conversion has been going well, except that my pH is doing crazy things.

FW_pH_27MAY2013_zps5f6e63fd.png

The drop several days ago was when I finished cleaning out my GFO/GAC RX and got it re-started with some GAC in it. Even though I pumped 3g of RODI through it, apparently there was still some vinegar making the pH drop. I would've been happier had it stayed there as my target is 6.5 pH. You can see how buffered my pH is as it climbed right back up. I think there is still a lot of calcium plating and buildup throughout the system, such as in the overflow and return lines. As the pH goes down, the calcium/bicarbonate deposits dissolve causing the pH to go back up. That's my guess. All I have in there right now is 150# of PFS, 1 small Anubias plant and a 1.2 lb piece of driftwood. No rocks.

The weird thing is I absolutely did not touch the aquarium on the 26th. It was my wife's birthday, so I barely even looked at the aquarium. Yet the pH drooped throughout the day then at midnight shot up even higher than before. Very odd.

To reduce the pH, I've seen it recommended in several places, like here, that I should use peat moss instead of chemicals.

Filtering through peat moss is the most effective way to lower your pH. Some people also use peat moss in their substrate for the same effect.

I'm going to stop by RCA to see if they have any (already called PetSmart, Petco and Gallery of Pets as they were already open). If they don't, I'm planning on stopping by Lowe's and grabbing this Fafard 3 cu ft Peat Moss bag. It's supposed to be 100% organic without any fertilizer or stuff added. Does anyone have experience with this or something similar?

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unless you are keeping something super fancy (and even that is arguable) i don't think you need to worry about PH in freshwater tanks. most of the fish are tank bred and run on tap water in the LFS so they are used to the PH being different. for my FW i generally ignored the PH reading on the strip. it ran at "brown" which i think is about 8 - 8.5. i never had a problem that i would attribute to the PH. perhaps the big swing is also caused by something wonky in the cycle, or the other options you mentioned. I wouldn't worry about it.

I'm also not sure about running GFO in FW. i just use fish to eat algae and they do a pretty good job. with a tank your size you have plenty of options. i liked my bristle nose pleco. right now i have an army of 5 ottos in my 55 gallon tank and 3 in my 20g tank. i need a few more in the 55 gallon, but i think that the 3 in my 20g planted tank have been doing a fine job. although, i got a snail outbreak in there that hitchhiked on some plants. when i get that cleared up i may need to add a fourth. but if i ever have to scrape the glass it is either that the fish have decided to stop eating algae (Siamese algae eaters only eat it when they are young), they died, or something is going wrong. i usually end up having to feed them, actually.

on my FW i run no filtration other than a canister filter with the ceramic media (no GAC). plants i suppose count in the 20g. My 55g is not currently a good example because i severely disturbed the sand bed and threw everything out of whack. but it ran beautifully for years before i was dumb.

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I'm not running GFO in the RX. I had just GAC to try and clear the water after adding a bunch of sand. I'll probably stop using it unless the water gets discolored again. At lunch I bought that bag of organic peat moss at Lowe's for a whole $10. It's huge! I added about a cup of it to the RX's second chamber, and the pH is slowly coming down. It's on my Apex, so it will be pH limited. I'll post if I see any problems with it. It could be a really cheap solution. I think that bag will last for decades.

The elephant nose and other African bio-tope critters we're getting are kinda expensive, so I figured it couldn't hurt to try and match parameters (on the cheap and easy). I don't plan on breeding, but I wouldn't mind it either. The online literature shows a tighter pH range for plants than (most) fish. Did you ever notice an effect on plants?

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First thing that I noticed is that it is weird that your pH in your DT and sump are off from eachother in parrallel. In a FW tank I would expect them to be pretty much synonymous (better get you those pH solutions right? :)), with maybe the sump being a bit more alkaline due to CO2 being driven off due to splashing. Although in retrospect I guess that depending on the ambient air CO2 levels (how tightly your house is sealed) that you could be having the opposite effect and introducing more CO2 via sump splash.

Once you start to add decoration (specifically driftwood) you should see a drop in pH. I don't know what your end goals are here, but I'm with planeden that I wouldn't mess with pH too much unless you have a species that is very sensitive to low pH. Alternately, if you start injecting CO2 for plants, that would be another way to get your pH down :).

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Yea, my DT probe is crappier, and no matter how many times I calibrate it it's always off. I've given up and really count the sump probe as the master/standard.

Good point about the wood. We plan on added driftwood and a lot of plants. It'll be mostly Anubias which I guess don't really care about CO2 injection. That's fine with me as I want to keep it simple. I'm looking forward to seeing the interplay between wood, plants, etc.

I should just take both of your advice and relax, but I still have that reefer mindset :)

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i have many many days of experiences with plants (started in february, for all intents and purposes). i admit that i did not do a lot of research before i bought them. i have bought 5 or 6 species. thus far two types have been problematic but the rest are doing very well. if i were to guess my problems have been more fish related as the ones that did not do well were the stemmy kind and the fish would pick on them, sleep in them, and they eventually cut the stalks off. i have some plant substrate and use the fluval fertilizer pellets.

the grass i bought is doing a bit too well. it started with 12 small clumps and has taken over about 75% of the substrate (good). but it is so tall that my pagoda looks like some sort of ancient ruin buried in the jungle waiting for indiana jones to come plunder. i don't think that anything in there belongs in a museum, though. it's usually just a blue platty.

i have been thinking about testing my PH though after reading up on it (in one of your linked articles). my initial idea was that less surface agitation will increase the CO2 in the tank and be better for the plants. but, i learned that agitation can bring in CO2, so i was going to compare PH between my tanks and see if more aeration would actually give me plants more CO2. i am not running a CO2 injector or anything.

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I'm still in a SW mindset, so other than monitoring my nitrogen cycle all I've got to look at is hardness and pH. And pH and temperature are the only things monitored on the Apex that I can see from work. The goal is to get a stable system that I don't need to devote hours to every day like when my DT was SW, but while I'm in town I still feel like tinkering with it.

I'm trying to get my pH neutral, because the African species my wife wants are in the 6-7 pH range while the South American and SE Asian species I want are in the 7-8 pH range. It might be too fine a line to walk or the fish might not really care, but I want to give it a shot.

I still have old coralline and abiotic calcium & bicarbonate debris leaching into the water. That's great for KH but not so good for pH and GH. It's definitely buffering my system well. I still have my pH probes calibrated to 7.0 and 10.0, but I should have them calibrated to 4.0 and 7.0 by Monday. The API High-Range pH test jives pretty close with the probes (last reading from DT looked like 7.8 pH). I think the DI I'm adding (trying to get the GH down with water changes) is slightly acidic from my color-drop tests and the LFS's recollection, but the graphs below show it higher around 7.5ish. My DT pH probe has always read higher than the sump probe, so I don't know how much is actual or false-sensor divergence. I should swap them and see how they read for awhile.

I've been trying the organic peat moss that I bought at Lowe's for only $10 (possibly a lifetime supply). At first I added about a cup to the second chamber of my dual reactor (it was empty with GAC in the 1st chamber). I was afraid of dropping pH too fast, so I had the Apex controlling the RX's pump based on pH. It barely dropped at all.

Since that wasn't having much effect, I threw handfuls of the peat moss into some 4"x12" filter socks (basically panty hose) and threw them in the sump like tea bags. That worked, and I've been very pleasantly surprised at the gentle decrease in pH.

FW_pH_03JUN2013_zpsb6c18da1.png

You can see the pH weirdness at the beginning of the graph that I mentioned in the post above (OP).

FW_pH_04JUN2013_zpsbc68a5e1.jpg

You can see where I did the water changes (about 18g out of a 150g system, or 12%). What is really interesting to me is that both probes spike towards 7.5 with the added DI water. That tells me there is a difference between the tank pHs, that the probes are working well relative to each other and that the DI water's pH is between the two probe readings at about 7.5 pH.

I last added peat moss a week ago on May 28th (original amount about 3-4 cups total). It looks like it's running out of steam, and I need to change it. I think peat moss is supposed to bring water to around 6 pH. I bought some more small plants over the weekend, and it looks like they started photosynthesizing like crazy according to yesterday's DT spike. I don't have anything in the refugium anymore.

The bottom line is that the peat moss is cheap and has been lowering pH really gently. I like it so far.

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interesting. what i read on my filter was that DI water is so empty that it will almost instantly pick up the PH of the water and should have no effect on the system. that is way out of my knowledge scale, so i can't say that i understand or give you anymore insight into it.

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interesting. what i read on my filter was that DI water is so empty that it will almost instantly pick up the PH of the water and should have no effect on the system. that is way out of my knowledge scale, so i can't say that i understand or give you anymore insight into it.

Yea, there was no buffering - the system was back to the previous pH or overshot to the other side in a minute or two.

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For over a year I haven't been able to get my two pH probes on my Apex to converge. They've tracked well, but the DT probe always read higher (SW then FW). Yesterday victoly got me some 4.0 and 7.0 calibration fluid. Last night I calibrated the probes at the acidic end of the scale. The DT probe took 4 tries, but the sump probe only one. Afterwards, they're tracking awesomely! The sump has the ATO inlet and the peat moss in it, so I expect the sump to be a tad lower at times.

FW_pH_10JUN2013_zpsbd25f33a.jpg

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