Aquarium Answers

Yesterday we decided to buy a chemical test kit for our freshwater aquarium so that we could see if there are any problems in our tank before we replace the dead fish from earlier this week. Since we really had no idea what the problem might be, we had to splurge for the $40 kit that tests for everything - pH, ammonia, nitrates, and nitrites. The testing was actually kind of fun - but that may be because I am a science geek.

Anyway, the results were pretty good. The only level that was off was the pH, which is too high (8.3 when it should be between 6.5 and 7.6). Further research showed that this pH level would have put the fish under stress, so it's a definite possibility that it contributed to their death. Most likely cause? Adding hard water to the tank. We have a softener, which runs every 2-3 days. But sometimes toward the end of that cycle we end up using all of the soft water before if re-generates. To fix this and have softener run more often, we end up using much more salt, which costs more money. We went rounds with the Culligan people last winter after getting the new softener system installed and discovered there is just no good fix to this problem. So we deal with having a little bit of hard water every now and then - we don't even notice.

But apparently we're going to have to pay close attention to that when we clean the tank and do water changes. The good news is this problem should be easy to fix with a couple of water changes with soft water. And we can check the pH more often now that we own the test kit, so we should be able to stay on top of the problem now. So we'll be doing a 30% water change this morning and hopefully that will hlep. We're planning to get more fish this weekend if we can get the pH under control.