What causes your Ph to raise?

Question

My Ph has gotten higher but Ammonia and nitite are 0. What causes this and should I worry about it? It is about 8.2.

Will my fish be fine if I just leave it?

Answer 1

Just leave it!

My PH has sat comfortably at 8.2 for years and years. It's never cause me any problems with the fish.

Fish are actually very tolerent of a wide range of PH and will be fine in your water. To start messing with it usually ends up leading to an unstable tank. See, no matter what you add to the tank, the elements in the water making it a high ph in the first place are still in the water, and it will inevitably start rising again - unless you want to go through the effort of mixing R/O or distilled water with your tap water at every change.

So don't worry. Just make sure nothing in the tank is causing it to rise - shells, coral, crushed coral, calcium rich rocks like lime stone.

And don't worry, Driftwood does by no means raise the PH, despite the previous posters error. If anything it will lower it, but usually ends up just not doing much to it at all.

Answer 2

First off find out what the natural PH is for your fish. There is a good chance that an 8.2 is within a natural range for them. The best way to maintain a correct PH is with water changes. Making sure that your water supply is consistant. The only problem that you will have is if and when you add more fish to your tank. If the fish store maintains a 7.0 ph the new fish will more then likely die unless you ease them slowly into your PH range.

I personally perfer to keep my PH levels at a natural level for the fish. I have found that the best way to reduce the PH is to do a mixture of 40% distilled water with my well water and then add in a little PH decreaser to fine tune.

What the distilled water does is to reduce the buffering compasity of the water which reduces the amount of decreaser that I need to use. I do once a month water changes and have never seen my PH increase in that time. Now you might need to go to a 50-50 mix but I would not add any more distilled water then that.

Good Luck and I hope this helps
PK

Answer 3

Serena,

Like the others said, I suspect if you let things be, it will be just fine. What did this rise from? The reading now is 8.2, but what was your original reading? The reason I'm keying on this is that the scale of ph is logrithmic in nature. A shift of one point seems minor in how we look at that, but that's actually a factor of 100 times. Meaning, if your PH shifted from say 7.0 to 8.2, it's more then 100 times more Potential of Hydrogen then what is was before.

Now fish can tolerate these shifts, but it must be gradual. I'd suspect this massive shift did not occur just overnight. I support that idea in the fact you didn't see anyone dying off in numbers. This is also why it's not a good idea to fight your PH either. These shifts up and down by only just 1 point is on a much larger scale, and those shifting ions in the water really does alot of damage to fish on a molecular level.

Answer 4

As peetee says, could be in your tank, or just the way your water is. Sea shells, crushed coral, some rocks like lime stone will all raise ph.

Get a glass of water and test it, leave it out for about 12 hours and test it again. That should be about the same thing that will happen in your tank.

Most fish should be able to handle an 8.2 reading ok. Some fish like tetras that prefer softer water may not breed in the tank, but they should survive ok. Just be sure to allow a lot of time for the fish to adjust to your tank when you buy them.

Answer 5

It would be from whatever to your tank, like coral or driftwood. Or it would effortlessly be your faucet water - verify the pH of the faucet water. It's so much higher to have a regular pH, even supposing it is quite above eight, than to make use of one of the vital pH down chemical substances. Most primary is the buffering ability of your water - that is what makes the pH wish to stick on the identical degree. So even supposing you decrease the pH with an acid, the buffering ability of your water will make it swiftly go back to eight.two. and that is annoying in your fish. If your water supply pH is prime, you would bear in mind making use of bottled water - spring or RO, no longer distilled, while you do your water alterations.

Answer 6

Something in your tank or your tap water is raising the pH. Do you have shells or calcium containing rocks or coral gravel or ornaments that could be slowly dissolving?
Also,what is the pH of your tap water,sometimes municipal water supplies change pH seasonally.
Could be any of these.

Answer 7

Another thing that always raises your pH. is driftwood. If you have added some wood recently, then that's your culprit right there. Unless it was properly soaked before hand.

Answer 8

your homeostasis could have been disrupted it could be something to see your doctor about