Building RO water up to correct pH, KH and DH

Interesting. KH goes down because it is used up as a buffer. If GH do not go down, the water is not getting softer. But it may be because it is soft allready. Seems like it only makes hard water softer, if I read them correctly. I take it you are not measuring GH with a TDS meter, which will give you a false reading, because of the phosphates not being part of GH.

 

Hi Peter,

please just do me the favour and stop using this discus buffer because you do not need it in the Cape. As we have discussed at length, it should be used if you have a high kH and then it will stabilize the pH to lower levels. You do not need this, you do not have a high kH and your pH is not a problem, once the fishes are fed properly and your biological filtration breaks down the ammonia this you do not need anything to bring your pH down.

We have had endless discussions on phosphate and how this stimulates algal growth, but this is a hotly debated topic, so just let us not even go there.

You do not need this stuff, believe me.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

hehe, Prof, you are doing it again. Peter has stopped long ago using Discus Buffer. I was just asking him about his experience with it. I sit with a bottle that I bought 4 months ago and were tempted to try it, but soon realized it will not be wise. So we are just discussing it. Peter has indicated it does not work for him and I indicated that I decided against it.

BTW, I am busy watching the video you mentioned in the Blackwater thread. The one in the river, with Altum Scalare in its natural environment. It is just amazing. Thanks for the link. Just imagine how we going to make you pull your hair out, trying to mimic that water! But I want mine clear, not like tea...

 

OK, I am glad that we have established that if you have soft water, Peter you have soft water from your tap, Tom, you have soft RO water, then you DO NOT NEED discus buffer!!!!! Hurrah, I have got this across to you!!!!!!

Tom and Peter, your water is not that far from the altum water, but keeping altum is another story entirely....

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

Prof Bellstedt and TomK
Rudi mentioned something in passing which caught my attention earlier.
The tap water in Cape Town might come out soft with a pH of 8 - but just let it sit for 24 hrs and the pH will come down to an acidic level in line with what you'd expect with soft water. So the penny dropped. By adding Discus Buffer I am just delaying the whole settling down process - by adding KH booster I confuse the whole barrel.......... the water must be saying WTF do you want ?????????????
In future, starting with tomorrow's water change I will add what I need to get rid of the chorine and chloramines (I'm using AquaSafe - but I think I should change to Prime??) and add the required bugs with Cycle - leave the water alone for a few days and test - to see what water I really do get out the tap. Stay tuned. I'll let you know over the weekend.
TomK to answer your question about the TDS meter - no I don't have one of those bru - I have the SERA Freshwater box kit - I can almost do all the tests even in a coma now.
Prof Bellstedt - what now boet Altum water??????? Is this my homework assignment?? :thrasher:

 

lol:beer:

 

@Peter Leid


If I understand it correctly, then you are meddling with water chemistry, and biology to no genuine benefit.
There are more accurate, less painful ways of determining tapwater make-up.

If you could clarify further?
It does not sound right.....

ESPECIALLY Do not waste your time adding biostarter/boosters like you state "required bugs with Cycle" to water you are conditioning !
If you are doing so in the absence of a substrate for biofiltration, you are adding, and WASTING product.
It belongs INSIDE the filtered aquarium, and never in containers/tubs/tanks where you are ageing or pretreating water

Filter bacteria and bio-enzymes are not going to be part of investigating what water you really do get out the tap , what would they be doing in tapwater to begin with??

Oftimes our fish are VERY forgiving, and do well DESPITE What we think is correct methodology, and NOT DUE to our well-meaning actions.

Gimme a call sometime, I'll help you with some water preparation tips that will suit your Discus
THEN you can get some L46 Zebra pleco too!

....Trevor has my numbers

 

@ Altum
We need to get together - I need a check-up from the neck-up vis the way I prepare water for water changes apparently.
You are of course quite correct - some of the most attrocious things ever done have been done with "good intention".
Indeed - a Zebra Pleco might be an excellent addition to my fishy investment.
Just for the record bru - when the Professor Bellstedt person says "Altum water" is he refering to you? If so.....:adore:

 

Hi ALTUM
Regarding:

My NOKIA bit the dust last week and I have submitted to the BB BS........... company policy sucks.
1. Please PM me Trevor Pleco's contact numbers - and as I can't reach Trevor, please let me have your contact numbers at the same time.

So where am I regarding this thread related to pH - kH & gH for reservoirs containing Water Change Water for Discus tank set-ups.

I took all the comments to heart and prepared my 260 litre barrel for a fresh start.
On Sunday morning my freshly filled barrel started the check-up proceedures - the record follows:

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Based on my "new expectation" I am a little sad about these results. I had been expecting a more significanty pH change.
I will continue to monitor the water but when the weekend looms large and there are no changes, I will have to be bad and revert to my old ways.:ridinghorse:

 

Hi Peter,

I must be quite honest, I do find your avatar to be very positive, and it and your email express an attitude which reads, "if you do not prove me wrong" I must be right. You write at the end of your email "I will have to be bad and revert to my old ways..... with this monkey jumping up and down", this is saying just this.

Persons that participate on this forum, come here to gain information and to share their opinions, but now you are saying "Well Rudi and Altum, you said to me that my tap water was going to go acidic by just leaving it, and now it has not, so you must be stupid". Have you ever thought that writing your email in this way is bringing across the message like this? Well it is, and I think you are being quite offensive towards Rudi and Altum. The bottom line is that you were getting advice from Altum who is very experienced in keeping discus in Cape Town water and who was actually doing you a favor by indicating that you do not need all this expensive stuff that you want to add to your water.

I must ask you, how can your kH and gH measurements change like this? Why did you measure 4 gH initially and then you measure 3 gH? Where has the general hardness gone? gH consists of Calcium and Magnesium, this cannot just disappear into the atmosphere. Then you measure 0 kH and then after a few hours you measure 2 kH. Where is this coming from all of a sudden? I would like to say to you that the kits that you are using are totally inadequate in measuring these low levels and are a total waste of time and money.

You wrote and I quote "By adding Discus Buffer I am just delaying the whole settling down process - by adding KH booster I confuse the whole barrel.........." Discus buffer has absolutely nothing to do with "the settling down process", it is introducing phosphate as a buffer which is useful in water that has a high carbonate hardness, which Cape Town water does not have. You do not need this at all because the tap water has no carbonate hardness so there is no need to bring down the pH. Additionally adding KH booster is also completely wrong when keeping discus, you want to keep the carbonate hardness down, so why add it?

If after leaving your water to stand for 24 h and then adding the water to your aquarium, say with a 50% water change, you will find that the pH will go up say by one pH unit, but by doing this water change you will be removing all the discus buffer and KH booster that you have been adding to your water so unnecessarily so far. If you repeat this water change with weekly intervals a couple of times and this removes more and more of the discus buffer and KH booster, you will find that the pH will start going down and will be acidic and that you will not have a problem keeping the pH down, as a matter of fact you will battle to keep the pH up, you will need to add bicarbonate of soda to stabilize this. This is the experience that Altum and I, and many others have made over the years in keeping discus in various suburbs of Cape Town, and there is no reason to think that your water will do anything else.

Folks here are giving you advice to save you money and improve the health of your fishes, but from your comments I get the feeling that you are inferring that folks are giving you incorrect advice which is not the case at all. The English proverb reads "You can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink". The choice is yours.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

@Dirk Bellstedt and @Henk Hugo. Just for the record, I think you are both totally out of line and must work on your people skills.

 

Noted and I'll take your input to heart! Thanks @TomK

 

As a moderator I sometimes wonder why we allow people onto the forum... and then I remember... if it wasn't for people, there wouldn't be a forum.

Firstly... let me first say: @Henk Hugo... calm down boet. You not earning any brownie points.

@TomK and @Peter Leid
Whilst I appreciate the efforts you are trying to achieve here... let us also take into account that you both live on opposite sides of the world. Your combined references and results will be very difficult to each other's...

Guys.... based on this thread, it looks like we are trying to invent the wheel again, but are looking for a triangle that rolls. This "Dirk Bellstedt person" (a reference with a highly arrogant and rude undertone to it might I add...) is a highly experienced fishkeeper with regards to fish keeping. Dirk is not trying to impress anyone, nor belittle you in anyway. He has given you hard FACTS.

Altum has echoed the same response, as has Rudi.

All 3 members, Dirk, Altum and Rudi are probably rated as some of the best fish keepers on our forum, and not only related the the keeping of fish and plants, but in their expert knowledge, understanding and experience with water chemistry. All 3 of them have experience with the horrible soft water the Cape-Tonian's experience, and I believe that whatever they advise you with regards to water chemistry to be written in you bible-of-fishkeeping.

Based on the recent tests we have seen, I would suggest that either your test kit is highly inaccurate, or someone is slipping RO water into your holding barrel without you knowing.

 

Hi Ashley,

Thank you for calling this thread back to order.

In an attempt to understand what went wrong in this thread, I went back to the first post, and this actually already tells you why. TomK, you were asking about how to reconstitute water and Peter Leid was wanting to use CO2 and wanted to know which carbonate hardness his water should be (or something to this extent as this thread was elsewhere and I do not have the time to find that thread as well). These are two fundamentally different questions based on different concepts and this has lead to one misunderstanding after the next, as Ashley has said, trying to re-invent the wheel.

When you want to reconstitute RO water, you should use the chemicals or solutions as the suppliers sell them for that purpose and that is it. The more of these reconstituting "salts" you add, the harder the water becomes and this will be specified on the bottle. You should then not add other things as well, as the reconstituting salts are already aimed at given the correct balances of different components including general hardness and carbonate hardness. On the bottle it will also say if you add say one teaspoon per 100 litres then the gH and kH of the water will be x and y. Then you know exactly what you are dealing with and you can use the water accordingly. You can also buy "salts" for reconstituting water for discus keeping and this is the sort of product you should use for softwater fishes. I will purposely not mention any brands here.

Peter Leid is trying to do the most difficult thing possible and that is to combine growing plants using CO2 fertilization with keeping discus. There are certain inherent conflicts in this, plants need nutrients in the water, this hardens the water and the discus do not want this. If plants are to be fertilized with CO2, there needs to be a certain amount of carbonate hardness in the water, and carbonate hardness is what you do not want in discus keeping. On top of this there is one glossy picture and book showing you the most beautiful discus in planted tanks. This is nothing short of hideous because if you investigate in which tanks serious discus keepers and breeders keep their fishes then not a single one of their tanks contains plants. Look at Heiko Bleher's Discus Book II and you won't see plants, you will see fishes, but no plants and discus together, maybe the occasional tank but this is the exception. I have kept and bred discus since 1988 and I gave up on keeping them in planted tanks in about 1995. Mine are all kept in bare tanks with logs in which I can do the tank management so that the discus are kept healthy, I do not fiddle with the carbonate hardness and pH all the time as I know it harms them.

Then I would like to say that in any biology degree at any university in the world, you get taught about pH, buffers and equilibrium chemistry in chemistry and biology at first year level, again at second year level where you get taught this again in greater detail and in chemistry again at third year level. It gets drummed into biology students repeatedly because without understanding this in depth, you cannot understand how biological processes work. Our blood is buffered by carbonate buffer without it we would die in no time and so we can carry on. For keeping fish and plants in an aquarium, you actually need to understand this perfectly or else you end up with what has happened in this thread, one question after the next showing major gaps in understanding. I cannot write a whole section about water chemistry on this or any other forum, I would do nothing else. So if you want to keep fishes and plants successfully you need to get to understand this, that is why I refer people to good books all the time, but somehow this message does not come across. We live in an age of quick fixes (the internet, let's quickly google this....), we want to read something quickly and then move on. Well this lot is such that you cannot do that because then you just have problems and do not understand what is happening in your aquaria. Many of these aspects can also actually only be understood if they are explained to you properly. I have students that I present a full 3 hour tutorial and then eventually they understand, but they cannot understand this from a book only. So the bottom line is if you want to apply basic principles in understanding your aquarium you need to understand them OR, you follow a recipe or a set of products, but you do not mix chemicals from different suppliers or add in something else, pH up or down or whatever, because you feel like it or because someone on the internet has said so. All this leads to the sorts of confusion that we are seeing here. And if you don't understand the concepts, you can ask and I will try to explain, but if you can't understand then it is not my fault, and I am also not obliged to getting you to understand, that you must do. However, if you challenge me and say that what I am saying is incorrect, then I will reserve the right to point out in no uncertain terms where you are wrong, and this is also what has been happening on this thread. I would like to take this one step further and say that is one of the major reasons why I contribute to these forums because I have the feeling that I am teaching someone to make a success of this hobby which is complicated at the best of times, whilst on the other hand there are loads of incorrect advice all over the internet, which will make that person eventually fail and loose interest in the hobby.

Finally, Tomk, you have indicated that I should work on my peoples skills. Well, in personnel management, when you see one person that is starting to chirp the rest and is starting to irritate all the others, but the others are actually working well as a team, then you address that person firmly and you tell him to tow the line, and that is what I did, yes firmly, but I felt that this had gone far enough. Why, because it takes one person that does not work together to upset a whole group that is working well, and in my opinion this is what was happening here. I have many years of experience in working in teams and heading teams for that matter and it was for this reason that I replied in the way that I did. So much for my people's skills.

I hope that you can now perhaps understand better, why I posted what I did before.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

+ 100 Prof @Dirk Bellstedt !
Now, even I, understand it for once!