Cloudy water

[DJW]

In my post this morning I had forgotten for the moment that you had altums, and wanted to revise my comments a little. I think you are right, trying to make the pH below 7, and if your tap/RO mix that gives the TDS you want ends up at 7.3 then using RO right was the right course. I don't know why you had cloudiness. Lots of people use this product for minerals without a problem. With water there are so many variables that we end up guessing sometimes. Is it bacterial bloom? is it this, is it that?

I don't know if your altums are young and still growing, but if they are Pat can advise on a good TDS to target for growth.

I think everybody needs to figure out a good routine for their water, and what one person does will not necessarily work for another. I have water very similar to yours, alkaline and hard. Here is what I do, maybe this will be helpful in some way. I don't use tap water for anything, it has too much alkalinity and nitrate. I use 100% RO and mix homemade minerals that do roughly the same thing as RO Right. My minerals don't have any effect on pH. I add the minerals until the TDS is where I want it. The pH in my barrels is always around 6.6, and I have never seen cloudiness that wasn't due to a young just-cycled filter. I keep several tanks with this stable water and don't bother to check the pH much.

I keep one tank right now at pH 5.5, the rest are at barrel pH of 6.6. All I do for that tank is put a handful of peat in a HOB, and two weeks later +/- it might wander up to 6.2 as the peat is expended. Then I replace the peat, it goes down to 5.2 over a few hours, then back up to 5.5. When I change water it goes up to 5.8 for a while. I don't care about these gradual shifts, the fish are fine with it.

I know that you don't like messing and guessing with water, but it won't be long before you have a routine and you can begin to forget about these details. By the way I still think there is something untrustworthy about your pH meter.

[zchauvin]

Dan, I do exactly what you are talking about, apparently my water has far less buffering capacity than yours. I was having a mini cycle for whatever reason as I was getting ammonia readings up to 1ppm for a few days. I completed last water change Friday evening after getting a reading of 0 ppm ammonia after 24hrs. It is now Monday and ammonia is still at 0 ppm. My water is significantly clearer and after putting my heater back up to 85 my fish have gotten there appetite back. I think the biggest factor here was adding the micron bag to inflow chamber of sump once it was completely cleaned of detritus as it was holding a lot of food.

Also, as of my water change on Friday, I had increased TDS from use of tap water to 50 and this seems to be the level I will need to achieve to give my water enough buffering capacity as my ph has held between 6.61 and 6.71 ever since. It has taken a bit of trial and error but it seems that this is the solution given my water parameters. Thankfully I have the information now that I can go down to a 50 TDS tap/ro mix before I get back ph fluctuations. Right now I am reconstituting with RO Right to get my mix from the 50 TDS mark to 100 TDS. Fish look happy, fins are healthy, and red color is starting to come out.

It was a PITA to get here and I can honestly say that when it comes to water, I will never give advice to anyone as it differs so much from one place to another that it simply comes down to trial and error. If it were not for how stubborn I am, like in many other instances, I would not have gotten the water parameters that I have and would not be happy. Now I, and seemingly the fish, are both happy. Nothing better than being able to sit back, relax, and enjoy the hobby.