ph, what is too low?

[art13]

I got an apex a few weeks back, and after hooking up a ph probe to it, i discovered my ph was sitting between 7.5-7.6. i ran an air line from outside to my skimmer, it seems to help, and put the ph between 7.7 and 7.8 after running it for a day. I then had a chance to open some windows and the ph was running between 7.9 and 8.1. Well, the windows have been closed for a couple days now due to the weather. Yesterday's high was 7.92, went down to 7.75 last night, sat there for a while, then at 6:30am this morning, started dropping pretty fast. Went down to 7.63 after the lights had been on for a few hours. Right now it is currently fluctuating between 7.63 and 7.66 depending on if the tank was just dosed with alk or not. Is this normal or ok? I don't really want to add kalk to the top off as it will mess with my dosing and is not a constant. anyone else have this issue? I also don't have a fuge, and i have no algae growing in the display, maybe cut back on the gfo and just stick with carbon dosing maybe to maybe give the algae a bit of the chance in the display? The CO2 uptake from the algae i'm guessing would be beneficial to the ph, i'm not sure how much though. At what ph does it become dangerous for SPS?

 

[art13]

To get to my main point and question, My house will not see a window open in the winter or in the middle of summer, the only thing i can do is run the line to my skimmer, could this just be a fluke due to high humidity and temp outside causing the outside air to not have much affect on my ph or during the winter will this be a problem?

 

[njtat2dguy71]

Double check you BNC connection. If that seems good, I would try and calibrate the probe. When I got my Apex gold about 8 months ago, I had the same issue.. The probe was always lower then an actual test kit. I started to think was the test kit or probe wrong. The only way I was to really figure it all out was to test some items that I knew the pH of. Somewhere on the net I found a nice chart giving the pH values of some household items like bleach, laundry detergent, baking soda and liquid egg whites.. I tested all those with the probe and the test kit. Realized my test kit was WAY inaccurate and my probe was generally off by about 0.85. I recalibrated my probe and since everything has been spot on as far as I can tell. I did retest all the household items and it was more accurate after the recalibration.

I have never really chased pH like others do, my tank currently is 8.05 and will drop to 7.90 at night and everything is more then happy

 

[Brando457]

he did compare it verse a test kit and calibrated it a few times so i don't think it is the calibration.

How is the surface exchange at the top of the tank? Maybe increase agitation.

 

[art13]

Surface exchange is great, fresh air line to the skimmer, which works well. Calibrated the probe a few times, also dipped it in 10ph fluid and it measured it perfectly. What I can't figure it is this, yesterday at about 6:30, ph took a nosedive from 7.73 down to 7.63 within a few hours and stayed there all day, didn't rise like normal during the day. Then last night around midnight, it decides to come back up and it's at 7.73 again this morning and rising, up to 7.91 now. Why did it dip yesterday and never rise, I can't figure out. I didn't change anything.

 

[d5332]

If you want plain old sincere advice, leave it alone.

If your tank is in a very poorly ventilated area such as a basement with zero ventilation than just leave it alone.

What you are embarking on ia called numbers chasing and typically leads to unnecessary issues.



Diego

 

[d5332]

The point of having a controller to monitor ph was truly to assist people with equipment and or dosing strategies that can affect a tank when something goea wrong, the infamous "tank crash".

The value of a controller is that when used with reactors that have the potential to kill everything when the reactor is not operated properly, the controller power strip can be set to turn off the reactor should ph exceed the set parameters hence avoiding a "crash"

With that said, sometimes we dont like learning from the mistakes of others, myself included.

If your fish are alive4
If you have a good % corals surviving

Just leave ph alone


Diego

 

[art13]

I've only done what i can to raise ph naturally, adding an outside airline. Not chasing any numbers, but i was getting little to no growth with my ph between 7.5-7.6. adding the outside airline helped tremendously, as my ph now usually sits between 7.8-8. i'm fine with that, i've more than tripled my dosing as well as a result of the increased growth with the raised ph. My concern was why my ph decided to drop one day starting in the morning and lasting all day, rather than raise up like it usually does. I may have worried a bit early on that one as that same night it started to raise again, but i just can not figure out what happened that day, i'm assuming excessive CO2 but i can't find any source for it.