MaddieLynn

I'm using Fritz A+ Aquarium Salt for my mollies, but from reading the label, I'm not sure if it's making my water brackish, or if it's just a water conditioner. It says that it can be used for goldfish and pond fish, so it makes me think it's not making the water brackish. Here's what the front says:

And here's some exerpts of what the back says:

Here are the "dosage" directions:

I'm using the tropical community dosage for my mollies, the one that says 2 teaspoons per 5 gallons.

so, is it making my water brackish, or is it just conditioning it?

What I'm really leading up to is, could I keep a Pearl Gourami with my mollies in this water?

agabr123

aquarium salt is completely different than marine salt. marine salt will make your tank brackish, aquarium salt wont. i'm pretty sure that aquarium salt just acts as a conditioner, like you said.

as far as compatibility with the pearls, i'm not really sure at this point. generally i would say no, but i'm sure there are plenty of people who add at least some aquarium salt to their tanks and have pearls.

MaddieLynn

So basically I am keeping my mollies in freshwater?

agabr123

yeah pretty much, if you wanted a brackish tank marine salt would be the way to go. i'm not really sure of the specifics, but there is something different about the make-up of aquarium versus marine salt. beyond that i'm definitely not a chemist so i really have no clue

MaddieLynn

If it helps any, here are the ingredients listed on the bag:

Sooo... would a gourami be OK with 2 teaspoons per 5 gallons of this stuff?

agabr123

ahhh okay i understand now. i was looking for more info, and the aquarium salt is measured by parts per million and marine salt is measured in parts per thousand.

if gouramis can handle harder water, then chances are they would probably be okay.

MaddieLynn

I just looked at the Pearg Gourami page, and it says:

pH: 6-8

My pH is around 8, but the page also says:

Water Hardness : 5° to 15° dH

I have no idea what that means! Anyone?

agabr123

i've seen a side that has 2-30 for the dH for them but that they prefer 8, but i dont really know what that converts to or means either....

Angela_96

Hard of Soft water is how alkiline or acidic the water is. Most of your higher ph waters are high in hardness and the lower ph is softer.

mathas

Technically, pH is a measure of free hydrogen ions. The more hydrogen ions, the more acidic a solution is; the less hydrogen ions, the more basic.

"Hardness" is a term that can mean either the content of minerals in the water, often calcium or magnesium (called general hardness, or GH), or it can mean the concentration of carbonate/bicarbonate ions (called carbonate hardness, alkalinity, or KH), and influences the liquid's ability to resist pH changes.

In general, a higher degree of hardness is found in water with higher pH, and softer water often has a lower pH. However, it is possible, though less common, to have water that is both hard and acidic, or soft and basic.

The following links may prove useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DGH
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate_hardness
http://www.thekrib.com/Plants/CO2/khgh.html
http://board.fishchannel.com/Topic137823-5-1.aspx
http://www.thetropicaltank.co.uk/hardness.htm
http://www.skepticalaquarist.com/doc...oftening.shtml

Angela_96

I will comment on this tomm when I actually see our solution at work that we use to run blood gasses on people.
We run a ph, co2, o2, and bicarb.

The co2 is acidic the higher it gets, the bicarb is the buffer (in the human body)
Their are certain conditions that causes the bicarb to go way down (diabetic ketoacicdosis) and the patient will have even as low of a ph as 6.8, normal human ph is 7.35-7.45

When the co2 goes off the charts (most common with overdoses where a person stops breathing and the co2 in the bloodstream builds up, then the COPD (chronic lung patients) have high co2 levels. WHen a CO2 gets too high, the patient will go into respiratory arrest and stop breathing.

The alkalinity in the body and acidity in the body is determined by several factors, the ph going up or down caused by the buffer or the acid. After a conditon becomes chronic the co2 and bicarb in the body will complety go in opposite directions to get the body in a normal ph.

We give bicarb as part of ACLS, it is one of the primary causes of pulseless electro activity in the heart (along with cardiac tamponode and some idiot bagging the patient to the point their lungs inflate like ballons and stop the heart, I have seen that when certain medical people touch patients that shouldn't)

As far as biochem and the human body are concerned the ph is a direct determination of acidois or alkalinity.

mathas

That sounds right.

I think a lot of the confusion with understanding pH, GH, KH, and the relationship between the three, for myself included, has to do with the term alkalinity. A solution with a pH above 7.0 is considered to be basic or alkaline... but as I understand it, alkalinity is not technically a measure of how alkaline a solution is, though there is often a correlation between the two.

Angela_96

With what I said above, carbonate hardness determines alkalinity. Their is bicarb in the water and how much affects the ph just as in the human body. I have never seen (out of thousands of bloodgas's) seen a person have an extremely high bicarb that had an acicdic ph. I will directly quote my husbands liminology book when I get home tonight on this subject.

mathas

Please do! While we're a starting to get a bit off-topic from MaddieLynn's original question, it's good information to have.

My understanding is not that carbonate hardness determines alkalinity, as you say, but rather that carbonate hardness is the same thing as alkalinity, and that alkalinity is not a measure of how alkaline/basic a substance is.

In her book Ecology of the Planted Aquarium, author Diana Walstad says the following:

The middle quote, the strict definition of alkalinity, is attributed to Robert Wetzel's Limnology in a footnote.

Google Books offers up a section of William John Matthews' Patterns in freshwater fish Ecology found here, that says the following: