w/c or not?

[hag]

my ph in my thank is 7.4 and out of the tap its 8.0. Could this be cased by the resent rain? Should i do a water change with the ph being that high? Thanks!

[hag]

should i hold off on it to see if the ph goes down?

[mikel]

In my limited experience, I dont think a ph of 7 to 8 will harm any discus, so long as you stay consistent with your routine. What I do is simply treat my tap water, adjusted with hot and cold water so it's approximately the same as that in the tank, with a capful of Prime. Then, I simply pour the new water back into my tank and that's it. Let your water ph stabilize, and if you change about 40% of the water each day, the ph change due to water change wont be so drastic as to warrant your concern. Just keep up your water change each day, remember to treat with Prime, and that's it. Dont fuss, and you wont get fuss back from your fish and your water. HTH :)mike

[rfeiller]

discus are much tougher then they are said to be. pH, hardness is not as critical as some would want you to believe. they do have their preferences, but i have bred discus from pH of 4.5 and DH of 0 to pH above 8 and a hardess of 650ppm. the importance is no ammonia, nitrites and very important no nitrates. nitrates are the insidious ones that weaken the fish and make them prone to disease. and too many discus hobbyist do not monitor the nitrates.

by the way the perfect aquarium is the toilet tank. everytime you walk by flush it. you can raise 8 discus to large adult 6"+ size in a 20 gallon if you do your water changes.

[Cosmo]

you need to test your water out of the tap to see if the ph is stable or not. Put some in a bucket with an airstone, test the ph, wait 24 hours and test the ph again, you ,may find it's dropped due to the gassing off of CO2. It that is the case, you may want to consider aging your water overnight.
Jim

[hag]

the perfect aquarium is the toilet tank. everytime you walk by flush it.

Thats just hilarious and a great analogy of keeping your tank clean! lol.

thank you both for your advice and I think I'll go ahead do a w/c now. I'm still concerned but a little less so now. thank you!

[hag]

cosmo...thank you first off and i was wondering how much dose the ph you usually change. how long dose it have to sit for and do i de-chlorinate it first?

[Don Trinko]

My tap ph is always higher than the tank especialy after aging. I think the fish living in the water alters the ph because my tank always end up near 7.6 even though my tap is closer to 8.0
If you do a wc like most it takes several minutes or more to pump or dump in new water. This gives the fish time to adjust. It takes me abought 10 minutes to pump in the new water. If there was a large ph difference I would limit the water flow so that it took longer to refill the tank. .5 ph difference is not that much. It is also easier on the fish to go up in ph than it is to go to a lower ph. Don T.

[hag]

thanks Don T!