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Hey Guys,

What would be the best way to lower PH without using anything with Phosphate in it?

Cheers
Wayne

Introduce CO2, add peat(pls put in a net bag) and remove coral chips if any.

If it's over 7.6ph dilute your water with RO or distilled water first. You won't really get anywhere otherwise. Then you can use peat if you have good chemical filtration to remove the coloring or the only chemical ways I reccommend are Seachem's ph products. Most other ph lowering products will only work temporarily and cause the ph to bounce right back up. Changing ph is worse than too high of ph. So far I've used a few seachem's ph products to help adjust the RO water I'm using and have had no problems. I still opted to go the simple route and use peat granules in my ram tank with purigen to remove the color.

However chances are you don't need to soften your water. Unless your breeding sensitive fish or keeping wild caught fish it's not really an issue until your ph gets closer to 9. Even south american fish I've kept have adjusted to 8.4 ph without trouble. There are alot of reasons I chose to use RO water but softening the water for my fish was not really one of them. I've never had a problem with that.

Thanks guys for your feed back.

I'm running a DIY CO2 at the moment.

The reason for this queston is my tap water has a PH of 7, but has no KH or GH. I add baking soda to my new water before placing it in the tank, but the baking soda ups the PH to 7.6.

Would l be better off just adding new water into the tank to get a PH of 7 then add very small amounts of baking soda every few hours to increase my KH and try not to alter the PH?

So far this is what l have and are doing.
My Tank PH is 7.6, KH is 5deg. I did a water change last night 40lt (tank is 160lt). The new water had a PH of 7. I just added the new water in with no baking soda to drop my Tank PH down to 7 and l would think my KH would of dropped to. Once this is done l was going to add very small amounts of baking soda to up the KH to 7deg.
You guys think this would work?

Cheers
Wayne

Hi, I thought you are going to lower your pH and not raising the pH? Please clarify before we go on. Thanks.

Btw, adding baking soda will raise your pH not lower!

I think you should re-read what l said

What is your tank ph now?

I just tested my tank water. The PH is still at 7.6, but the KH has now dropped to 4deg.

Will be doing another water change on Friday night to see if the the PH drops.

Any idea's guys?

You can mess with your PH but that doesn't mean you are getting more CO2 into your system. Your KH on the other hand is kind of alright to mess with if it is really low. The lower it is the better the odds of a PH crash. The baking soda should only raise your KH... I think. This is something that I don't have to worry about because my KH is already sky high (17). With adding CO2 I am getting my PH down to 7 from 8.

55G Planted tank thread
19G Container Pond
[IMG]http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y118/Wingsdlc/Ric

I'm not really worried about KH or C02 as l have them under control. My problem what is the best way to drop my PH from 7.6 down to 7 without using chems that have phosphate in it.

Add more CO2

55G Planted tank thread
19G Container Pond
[IMG]http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y118/Wingsdlc/Ric

I think a tank with a kh of 7 and ph of 7 due to only co2 would be too a little too much co2. Keeping the ph at 7.2 would probably work great or keeping the kh at 5-6 and the ph at 7 would also work. A kh of 5 should be fine to keep the ph stable so you don't really need to raise it to 7. Adding more co2 would be the most effective, stable, and easiest way to lower the ph. Since you are already working with soft water I don't really see a point in messing with both buffers and acids. That's one reason I avoid seachem's buffering system. It uses both a buffer and acid to achieve exactly the desired ph but there's too many exceptions and room for error which would likely result in dead fish. Just not worth it to me. Pretty much all fish will adjust to a ph slightly above 7 so no point in risking their life just to bring it down .2 or .4.

Sham.. thanks for your input.

I will set up another C02 bottle this week and slowly add the baking soda to raise my KH to around 5-6deg. If l can get the PH down to 7.2 with C02 and my KH up to 6.. l'll be happy.

Cheers
Wayne