Help needed correcting PH levels

[Pvtdgrif]

Ok so I need help... Due to bad advice from the LFS when I setup my tank, I used 7.2 buffer as my tap water is 8.0 (see this thread for details of my setup and the bad advise i got from the LFS - http://aquariumadvice.com/forums/f15/how-not-to-start-out-following-lfs-advice-139587.html ). I'm still doing a fish in cycle ( again due to bad advice from the LFS), so following advice from this wonderful forum I'm continuing to use the buffer until the cycle is complete. Once it is complete I hope to slowly acclimatise the fish to 8.0 but I don't know how to do that without the buffer breaking down and the PH snapping back to 8.0.

Any advice would be greatly received

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[Pvtdgrif]

Any ideas? I'm worried about shocking my 6 TBs.

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[Saltair]

I got caught in this same mess once, but the spread wasn't quite as big. I only had to move .4ph so I did a 50% water change which in theory moved me up .2PH and the next day I did another 50% which got me back to the tap water PH. They say the fish can tolerate a .2 move in 24hrs. All the fish came through it ok, maybe a long term effect I will never quantify, but they lived through the actual adjustment. In your case maybe 25% a day over three or four days would have the same effect.

Maybe somebody with more experience would chime in with a better idea, but in the absence of better advice that’s the route I would take.

 

[Tim Wheatley]

Every water change I do I change my tank water by 2 points. My tap water is high pH but my tanks all are 0.2 pH lower, they always drop 0.2pH in a week (between water changes). My fish don't seem affected by it in any way.

Someone who is more experienced may answer, but you might want to just stop using the buffer. You could do water changes of a very small amount regularly and the fish should be able to acclimate, exactly if they had just come from the fish store and you had to acclimate them from the fish store water to your own.

 

[Pvtdgrif]

I got caught in this same mess once, but the spread wasn't quite as big. I only had to move .4ph so I did a 50% water change which in theory moved me up .2PH and the next day I did another 50% which got me back to the tap water PH. They say the fish can tolerate a .2 move in 24hrs. All the fish came through it ok, maybe a long term effect I will never quantify, but they lived through the actual adjustment. In your case maybe 25% a day over three or four days would have the same effect.

Maybe somebody with more experience would chime in with a better idea, but in the absence of better advice that’s the route I would take.

Thanks for the advice Saltair, but I was lead to believe that the problem with 7.2 buffer is that it doesn't allow you to water it down as it tries to compensate for the extra fresh water keeping the PH at 7.2 until it cannot cope any more, at which point it fails and the PH bounces straight up to the true freshwater figure in one jump. please can anyone tell me if that is correct?
If the above problem will happen, is it possible to water down "PH Down"? - maybe I could setup a QT with PH Down @ 7.2 and then do PWCs raising the ph by 0.2 a day over 4 days? Or maybe I could setup a QT with PH Down @ 7.2 and then raise the PH 0.2/day using PH Up?

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[Saltair]

I used PH Down not the buffer that takes you to a specific PH so my strategy may not work for you. It seems unlikley to me that if a given volume is treated and you exceede that volume the buffer just fails completely. I would think it would just fail to keep the larger volume all the way down to the advertised PH. Someone with more experience using these chemicals needs to chime in I guess.

When trying to undo PH adjustments the consensus on here as been to try and keep in simple, avoid using too much chemical. I would think moving the fish around from tank to tank while using chemicals to play with PH may stress your fish out even more. Looking forward to seeing what others with more experience may have to say on this matter.