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Has anyone used dried oak leaves in discus tank to make their water more acidic and tea colored? Peat is recommended, but living in New England, dried oak leaves means a free source every Fall! I plan to put some leaves in 5G buckets for a few days and then add it slowly to the tank. Just wondering if anyone has tried this or whether this is a safe and effective method. Thanks.
yep, I got about 3.5 kitchen garbage bags full still.
I add them to the top of the water and let nature takes it course and put the leaf litter where it "belongs"
I use about 5 leaves per 10g then go from there.
I also make my own BW extract using oak leaves. also a few chunks of oak in the boil mix helps it out a bit to with the color. Im not a scientist and dont know the invisible benefits of it but whenever my angels get fresh extract the eggs seem to flow freely.
I too have a few Oak trees in my back yard. I tried Oak leaves in my Apisto tanks. The fish loved the leaf litter but nothing happened to change the ph. My water is very hard witha ph out of the well at 8.2. I've also tried Almond leaves in my wild discus tanks. I use these along with peat in the HOB filter. The ph drops down to about 6.2. But I use RO water for the WC tanks. The Ph comes out of the RO at 7.2. The leaves and peat drop it about a unit.
It works best when you have a tannin rich piece of wood in there as well, all my tanks have DW in them and the leaves were added after that was added so I have no results for the Ph aspect but when the fish breed like crazy I figure the water parameters were ideal for them, Id bank the Ph was around a 6.5-6.8 from a 7.4 Ph source
I would check out your kH (Carbonate) level first. The higher it is, the more difficult it is to lower pH. I found that until I got my kH down to 3-5, it was pretty difficult to change pH.
hmm... never thought of that. may give this a shot next fall. will this help to cut down on r.o. usage?
It's all going to depend on how buffered your water is. Mine is so buffered that theres no way to soften the water with oak or almond leaves. I've found that if I use 100% RO and soften with Indian Almond Leaves the pH will hang around 6.6 or 6.8.
I imagine oak leaves would do the same.
Just thought I will provide an update: I put some oak leaves in a 5 gallon jug and left it for a couple (or more) weeks. Yesterday, I checked the pH, it is 8 from the tap, 7.5 in the tank and believe it or not, 6.0 in the oak stained water! My tap water is soft, so I guess it wasn't a problem to lower the pH by two units... Now if only I could find a constant supply of dried oak leaves (year round) and a good pair of wild discus..... :)
I've got lots in my back yard. I mean Oak leaves.
I tried it with my well water and the ph did not budge. My water is real hard with high alkalinity.