i think one of the annoying things about the aquarium hobby is there's just
so much to learn like why do these water test kits come with
extra pads for ph gh and kh um is this something i should care about
i'm Irene with girl talks fish here with practical tests for busy fish keepers like you meaning this
is not going to be some super technical science lecture for PhD students instead i want to talk
about the practical things that actually matter to your aquarium fish so let's get started
so let's just define these water chemistry terms ph stands for power of hydrogen meaning it's
measuring the hydrogen ions in your water and what that means is how acidic or basic is your water
now how much should you care i don't really look at this number very much because
most fish can live in like 6.5 to 8.0 ph however if you are breeding a certain kind of fish or
keeping a really sensitive wild-caught species
that might be a time when you need to pay attention so what i do is i just ask the breeder
or the fish store where i got them from and find out if it's important or not for that species
kh stands for carbonate hardness meaning it measures the carbonates and bicarbonates in
your water and practically speaking it buffers your water and prevents your ph
from dropping or changing sometimes at all so how much should you care well most fish
can do fine in like four to eight degrees or 70 to 140 ppm i'll put the conversion rate over here
um basically as long as it's not too low that's all we care about because if it's
too low sometimes your ph may rapidly change and that can be lethal to your fish in my case this is
a number i also don't really look at as long as my cage is above 30 degrees i don't really care
finally gh stands for general hardness which measures the calcium and magnesium in the water
basically how hard or soft is the water and how much should you care it's about the same as kh
most fish can live in about four to eight degrees or 70 to 140 ppm gh um however you just don't want
it too low because fish and plants need minerals to function that's why some people have a hard
time keeping aquariums when their house is on a water softener system that is stripping out
all those minerals now i know i may come off as pretty cavalier on how much water chemistry
matters just because most people's water and most species especially the hardy beginner ones
are going to fall within these ranges however if your tap water is way out of whack or when
you're researching a species you want to keep the internet you know google says yes definitely keep
the ph, gh, kh much lower or much higher than usual then these numbers are going to become
more important to you and probably should be something that you measure more often
okay everybody always wants to know how do i change my ph, gh, kh well first of all all
the methods i'm going to recommend are generally speaking going to be
gentler and also easy methods because if you use some of the more extreme techniques sometimes a
you can easily accidentally kill your fish and then b they might be really really time intensive
and for me i'm a lazy fish keeper so that's out the door for me now i personally have really weird
water i have a high ph and really low gh kh so uh i've got experience trying to lower my ph gh and
kh and it's pretty hard in my opinion so um some things i've tried is aquariums tend to acidify or
the ph tends to lower over time and so one thing you can do is do minimal water changes like try
to avoid changing water as much as possible um i have tried that method but whenever i had to
top off water that evaporated from the aquarium i was tapping off topping off with my tap water and
that always raised my ph back to 8.0 so really if i wanted that to be successful i probably should
have replaced the evaporated water with distilled water from my grocery store but that was just like
one step too much for me um another method is to add like catappa leaves driftwood other botanicals
that while they are breaking down in your aquarium they actually released some really
really mild acids and that method did work i was actually successfully able to lower my
8.0 aquarium to like 7.6 7.8 so not a lot but i wasn't like cramming a ton of leaves in there and
so i'm sure if i had upped the ante i would have successfully kind of lowered that ph even more
there are a lot of companies that sell active substrates for plants or shrimp that promise to
kind of lower that ph, gh, kh numbers however they are most effective if you're not constantly
pouring in really basic water like mine into it so kind of the final method is the most effective one
but the most time intensive one which is to use RODI water reverse osmosis deionized water and
you have to buy this like complicated looking filtration system hook it up to your tap water
there's going to be a bunch of waste water that's created and then the end product is this very
very pure nothing in it water that you can slowly mix into your aquarium to lower all these numbers
too much trouble for me if i wanted to do that i'd be keeping salt water tanks but
i'm here to keep fresh water tanks that i can just have fish in my normal tap water
me personally i've had more success raising my ph gh and kh for example
take a note from the book of African cichlid keepers because they are like experts at
keeping high water chemistry values and they will use things like aragonite sand or limestone and
dry rock that's intended for salt water tanks they'll use them as decorations and those all help
keep things real high i know aquarium co-op comes from really soft water land so they used crushed
coral either mixed in their substrate or in a little filter bag that they either put in their
hang on back filter or canister filter and that helps to raise the kh especially me personally
my gh is low enough that my plants actually start dying from lack of calcium and magnesium etc
and so i regularly dose um seachem equilibrium to raise my gh and basically the mineral content
in my aquariums once a week i basically use my test strips to do like a quick and dirty
measurement just to gut check mostly the nitrate level as well as the gh so if i'm low on nitrate
i'm going to add a little easy green fertilizer for the plants and then if i'm low on minerals
then some equilibrium also for the plants honestly i would just go with the lazy fish keeper method
and keep the fish that match your water parameters like your natural tap water so if you have
really soft water low ph go ahead and buy tons of discus South American fish crystal
shrimp i'm so jealous of you however if you have higher ph like me or hard water then go for the
African cichlids keep the live bears and then of course there's a ton of fish in between that will
you know more or less live in both sides of the spectrum so that's just my personal opinion if
you want to hear about the horror story where i tried to keep fish they were definitely mismatched
in ph here's that little disaster over there or if you're interested in part two of this series
where i talk about whether or not nitrate is good or bad for your aquarium i'm gonna drop it
over here once it releases take time to enjoy your aquariums and i'll see in the next video