Oscar Posted January 9, 2006 Report Share Posted January 9, 2006 Can someone please explain what this means? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Caryl Posted January 9, 2006 Report Share Posted January 9, 2006 Water is either soft, hard, or neutral - pH 7.0. Soft water generally refers to it being slightly acidic (a pH of less than 7.0) while hard water is alkaline (a pH more than 7.0). Some cichlids from Africa (most notably those from lakes Tanganyika and Malawi) prefer very hard water with a pH of around 8.0 or more. I have these cichlids but as mine were bred in a pH of 7.0 I have never bothered trying to raise the pH. Since the L. caeruleus keeps producing fry I don't think they are too worried about the lack of alkalinity. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoandWilly Posted January 10, 2006 Report Share Posted January 10, 2006 Hmmm caryl i think he would be talking about the general hardness (gH), i think thats right, but i wouldnt know how to explain it, it has something to do with the amount of metals that are dissolved in to water. Most cichlids like a high gH 10+ i think. I hope someone else out there can explain it better than me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bilbo Posted January 10, 2006 Report Share Posted January 10, 2006 Hard or Soft water isnt compleately dependant on pH. The pH is a measure of acidity or alkalinity of water. Hardness is a measure of how many additives are in the water. It is possible to have soft water with a high pH. We do normally assosicate hard water with higher pH. Hardness is then devided into temporary (carbonate) hardness which can be removed by boiling or standing water for a few days and perminanint (non carbonate) hardness which has to be chemically removed or filtered out. Test kits can test for both GH and KH of water which are the 2 types of hardness. Gosh I hope I got that the right way round. :-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Posted January 10, 2006 Report Share Posted January 10, 2006 Water hardness is to do with the amount of dissolved minerals present in water. A lot of (certain) dissolved minerals means hard water, very few means soft water. There are a couple of types of hardness: temporary hardness (also called carbonate hardness), called temporary because if you boiled the water the hardness would be removed; permanent hardness is a measure of how many calcium ions and magnesium ions are in the water; there is also general (or total) hardness which is a measure of both temporary and permanent (but I'm prepared to be corrected on that). There are a range of units used to measure hardness, two common ones are ppm (parts per million) and dGH (can't remember if it's degrees general hardness or degress German hardness) both of them start at zero and head on up, with zero being extremely soft. Caryl mentioned about pH - while the hardness of the water will often influence pH they are not the same thing. pH is how acid or alkaline the water is. It is measured on a scale of 0-14, where 0 is extremely acidic and 14 is extremely alkaline, with 7 right in the middle being neutral. In general, hard water will be alkaline and soft water acidic but you can get screwy situations where you end up with hard acidic water etc. Cichlids from the African Rift lakes (like Lakes' Malawi, Tanganika, Victoria) prefer hard alkaline water, most cichlids from South America and African RIVERS prefer softer more acidic water and I have a feeling that Central American cichlids prefer something in the middle (but again I'm happy to be corrected). Making water harder is easy - trying to soften it is more troublesome, because of this people who have hard tap water are often more restricted in what fish they can easily keep. Also it is more difficult to adjust the pH of hard water (it has more buffering capacity - just means it resists changes in pH more than soft water does). There are a range of things you can do to make water harder: add baking soda (this will boost the carbonate hardness, but will also bost the pH), add empson salts (will boost permanent hardness by increasing the amount of magnesium ions but have little affect on pH), add shells, oyster grit, limestone to the tank/filter (will boost both permanent and carbonate hardness and also pH) - adding to the filter is probably better because it's easier to remove it if you over do it. To soften hard water you could filter it through peat, get a water softening 'pillow' (contains an ion exchange resin that can be regenerated and reused) or mix the tap water with rain/reverse osmosis/distilled water. (note - wasn't my intent to to walk over Bilbo's reply - he posted while I was trying to write this essay ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nik007 Posted January 16, 2006 Report Share Posted January 16, 2006 Hi, There is a good recipe on the below site for making your own salt buffer for African Cichlids. I have used it and tested the water chemistry with a pH and Hardness testing kit and it looks good. All the ingredients are cheap and you can buy them from a supermarket. You can buy Cichlid salts from a pet shop but they are expensive. http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/buffer_recipe.php Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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