What does everyone put in their water?

[Very Fishy]

In preparing my aquarium for Discus, I first thought I had to have the water just right(pH). My tap water is 7.8 and I wanted to get it down to 6.5. I started by adding pH down. But the water was well buffered and the pH would bounce right back up the next day. I then tried SeaChem Acid Buffer and it worked a little better but the pH was still inching back up over a few days. After reading and researching, I learned that this would cause more stress on the fish than if I just left it alone.

[Carol_Roberts]

All the old books talk about lowering pH. Very Fishy is right. Now we know keeping the pH stable is much more important.

[Surfghost63]

Hi guys.

Nice thread timid

I have Ph 7.5, Gh 6 and Kh 3, out of the tap, I only age (a Hagen powerhead with a quick filter with fiber and charcoal eliminates the junk), aereate and match the temp of the main tank.

I was wasting my money by adding Sera Aqutan to "conditioning" the water, and tried peat for some time, the Ph only went to 7.0, so I quit using it, not worth the expense / chore.

Thanks to this excellent board, now I only put one ingredient , TLC to my tap water

Cheers,

Bill

[pissydiscus]

All I have to say is great thanks to this board. According to everything that has been said here it appears that I'm going to start aging my tap water with 2 buckets of heated water and aerating it for at least 24 hours. Then putting it in the tank after a WC. I'll only add in some ammo lock 2 from aquarium pharm to get out the chlorine. I live in the city so ....


I really appreciate all this information, those filters were costing me 20 bucks every 2 weeks with my WC schedule. Hurts the pocket book you know?

[Surfghost63]

Hi again timid.

The aging and aereating of the water will be enough to eliminate chlorine, please don't waste your money, it's not worth, you may want to spend it in buying some discus perhaps ? LOL

Good Luck,

Bill