I'm relatively new to fishkeeping, however, I have found that having fish is much like having chickens, you can't have just one. I now have 3 tanks! I have a 10-gallon tank that houses a betta (Einstein) and a tiger blood nerita snail. I also just separated my community tank (which is on an aquaponic system) into two tanks (I was keeping shrimp in there and wanted to be able to enjoy them) - a fish tank and a shrimp tank (which I will add fish to at some point if the shrimp start reproducing). My community fish tank (on the aquaponic system) has a flame dwarf gourami (Galileo), 5 X-ray pristella tetras and 2 harlequin rasboras (I lost a bunch during acclimation). The shrimp tank is heavily planted and has 3 mandarin shrimp and a zebra nerita snail and olive nerita snail. Everyone seems healthy for now. My biggest challenge so far is that my well water is very hard and has a high pH. I was getting different readings from strips, regular pH and high pH solutions. Finally went and bought a pH meter and found that the strips were the most accurate... I'm currently lowering the pH on all of my tanks using peat. Let's hope that works... Looking forward to getting great information from this community!
Hello!
- Thread starter JenB
- Start date
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Chesmok
Aquarium Advice Activist
If they seem healthy you might not need to change anything you're doing. Messing with hardness and ph can be tricky even for experienced hobbyists. Might be better just to keep them at these parameters for now they're probably used to it already changing too much would stress them.
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Thanks!
The pH in my betta tank was 8.15 (although it had been reading about 7.5 with the strips and wet chemistry kits - this reading was with a pH meter). I tried lowering the pH slowly with peat and he ended up with a fungal infection that appeared overnight and killed my wonderful betta. He was such an amazing fish. Going to track everything in the tank for a while and see if I can stabilize it at a lower pH before I get another betta. Someone told me that I shouldn't have plants with a betta - is this true? The only thing that I can find related to this is if it decreases the surface area and they have little space to breathe. I have a 10 gallon tank and 4 plants (all in the back) - so plenty of room. I've managed to get the community tank down to pH 7.4 (it was at about 7.8). The fish there seem ok. My shrimp tank is doing well - although I'm starting to see baby snails - so I'm contemplating moving the nerita snails out and getting some assassin snails. Any thoughts on that? I also did some more extensive testing on my well water and found that I had a toxic level of free iron, which may have been part of the problem. I am now filtering the water, but this also significantly lowers the pH to around 6.2 and decreases the GH and KH (obviously filtering out the minerals). Right now, I'm doing small water changes, because the tanks seem to be buffered from the previous unfiltered hard water, but I'm wondering if I should be adding calcium, magnesium, etc. if they are low. I bought some test kits for them to check, but haven't tested yet. I really want to try and keep this simple, but it just seems like it is not...
The pH in my betta tank was 8.15 (although it had been reading about 7.5 with the strips and wet chemistry kits - this reading was with a pH meter). I tried lowering the pH slowly with peat and he ended up with a fungal infection that appeared overnight and killed my wonderful betta. He was such an amazing fish. Going to track everything in the tank for a while and see if I can stabilize it at a lower pH before I get another betta. Someone told me that I shouldn't have plants with a betta - is this true? The only thing that I can find related to this is if it decreases the surface area and they have little space to breathe. I have a 10 gallon tank and 4 plants (all in the back) - so plenty of room. I've managed to get the community tank down to pH 7.4 (it was at about 7.8). The fish there seem ok. My shrimp tank is doing well - although I'm starting to see baby snails - so I'm contemplating moving the nerita snails out and getting some assassin snails. Any thoughts on that? I also did some more extensive testing on my well water and found that I had a toxic level of free iron, which may have been part of the problem. I am now filtering the water, but this also significantly lowers the pH to around 6.2 and decreases the GH and KH (obviously filtering out the minerals). Right now, I'm doing small water changes, because the tanks seem to be buffered from the previous unfiltered hard water, but I'm wondering if I should be adding calcium, magnesium, etc. if they are low. I bought some test kits for them to check, but haven't tested yet. I really want to try and keep this simple, but it just seems like it is not...
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