dvc_r

My Guppies in my 20 gal tank were acting funny last night and woke up today to find a few died. After checking my water parameters: ammonia=.25, Nitite=0, nitrate=10 pH=4.6 and phosphate=10!!!! Obviously my ph crashed again. This has happened once before. I think it's a combination of using RO water and CO2 for my plants.

I'm afraid I'm gonna lose my longfin Albino Bushy Nose Pleco. My question is What should I do?
I have a 75 gal tank for my Discus (that needs an algae eater soon) but I'm afraid if I put him in the 75 gal with a temp of 84 and PH of 7.0 I'll shock him to death. Do I keep him in the 20 gal while I vacuum and do a few water changes and slowly increasing the ph or put him in the more stable tank?

Amanda

YOu may want to slowly, SLOWLY acclimate him to your larger tank.
Then do a water change on the 20 gal.

agabr123

i'd put your pleco and the guppies in a large and CLEAN (never seen soap) rubbermaid/plastic container with about half of the water in it being from your 20 gallon, put the heater in there too to keep up the temperature. then VERY VERY slowly (maybe a liter of water every 30-60 minutes) add water from your 75 gallon while you deal with your 20 gallon. i'd also do a large water change in the 20, but add water from the 75.

why the RO water though? is your tap water really bad?

dvc_r

The water down here in Florida is "sub-par"! The PH is 8.4 and full of chemicals! My wife refuses to drink the water from the tap. This has been an ongoing argument with us. I can see spending money on water. We had a 5 gal water machine with deliveries every week (cost us a small fortune). Then my wife started to buy bottled water (24 in a case every few days)!
When I new I wanted a Discus tank, I told my wife how great the water is and also how much better our coffee (and everything else) would taste. So I now have an RO unit.

Do you think 84 degrees is to warm for the pleco? Everything I read say different temperatures.

agabr123

wow, that's awful. i don't really blame her for not wanting to drink the tap water. hmm, i dont think 84 degrees would be too bad for a short amount of time, unless you planned on having him in there permanently. i've read that they prefer water from 72-77 but i also have heard of people keeping them safely and happily in 80, but i havent heard either way on higher than that

mathas

This is a fairly likey cause. RO water doesn't have enough alkalinity to buffer the effects of the CO2, especially during non-photosynthetic periods. Do you leave the CO2 running even when the lights are off?

dvc_r

Actually I use the liquid form (Flourish Excel). From what I hear it only works during periods of light. It has done wonders for my plants!
.
This would be a permanent change. This would be his new home. That is also why I have an RO unit, it keeps down a lot of the algae in the tanks.

cerianthus

Sorry to hear to have such problem. Curious though, what did you use to measure such low pH?
If injecting CO2, yes, pH will be lot lower in the morning due to accumulation of CO2 overnight. If pH that low, should have lost bioactivities thus increase in both NH3 and
NO2.

Rather than moving Pleco which can be more stressful, do few small pwc to see if pH and Ammo improves. Given light, CO2 will be utilized by Plants/Algae thus pH can shift to safer level.
Used to use pH controller/CO2 Injector to keep pH around 6.4. Seen pH crash overnight but never that low. To make sure that such pH crash wont kill my treasures, used to have air pump on timer so excess CO2 accumulating at night can be driven off to ensure pH wouldnot crash to low.

If using pH probe, maybe need recalibration. just a thought!

agabr123

gotcha....hmm, yeah i don't know about 84 permanently...preemptively i'd say probably not, but i'll see if i can find any more info

dvc_r

Sorry it takes me a while to get back, I've got a bet with my son on the Tampa Bay/Montreal Hockey game...
What would you suggest for a maintainance fish for water that warm? I have six Juli and 4 panda corys but I'll need something to clean the algae. Someone else recommended a flying fox, but I also heard they can be aggressive. That's the last thing I need in a Discus Tank!

agabr123

snails! most definitely!

dvc_r

I have a hard time keeping snails. The RO water (...back to RO) doesn't have enough calcium in it so the snail's shells get soft and unhealthy.

agabr123

you can try tums, they're just calcium carbonate and i dont think that they'll have any adverse affects on your fish. i posted a thread about it asking if anyone had used them, no one here had (or they didnt see the thread) but i did a little extra research and i dont think that they're harmful

dvc_r

I never heard of that. I'll have to look for more. If I ever had the nerve to try one, it would have to be in a small tank (maybe my betta tank). But at $65 per Discus, I'll let someone else try. (lol)
So now I'm back to where I started ( lol again)
I gotta sign off, got a busy work day tomorrow. Thanks for your input.

agabr123

lol, yeah i completely understand, i'm trying it in a betta tank too, and i'm probably going to set up an old tank (a 1.5 that i had a wal-mart rescued betta in temporarily until i could get him a bigger tank) to breed snails in (for my soon to be dwarf puffers! ) you could always get a small tank like that to have them in with the tums and rotate them in your bigger tank. that might be a hassle but snails are cheap so i wouldnt worry about it too much, most stores will give them to you for free!

mathas

If you're using Excel, your carbon supplementation probably isn't the cause of the pH crash. CO₂'s effect on pH has to do with the chemical reaction between CO₂ and water... since Excel does not have the same chemical makeup as CO₂, it would seem logical that the same reaction wouldn't be taking place.

SeaChem's website also says "Flourish Excel is not carbon dioxide and there is no impact on pH using Flourish Excel."

If you're still trying to identify the cause of the pH crashes, you may have to look elsewhere

I've read a lot of posts on various forums where people have used Tums, but I probably wouldn't do it myself. Looking at the Tums website, there are a lot of extra ingredients in a Tums tablet if all you want is a source of calcium carbonate.

All of those other ingredients may very well be fine in an aquarium, but I'd have to do a lot more research before I felt comfortable adding it, especially to a tank using RO water... and when you can buy calcium carbonate in powdered form for $2.50/lb, why risk it? Cheaper than Tums without all the excess ingredients.

But that said, adding calcium carbonate will raise the GH in the tank. Whether or not this is a good idea in a discus tank I couldn't tell you.

Fishies-for-me

I have also heard of suppling snails with calcium by putting cuttle bone in the tank...the kind you buy for birds to sharpen their beaks on...not sure how this affects water hardness tho...I would research it before trying it.