Cichlids and CO2

[Eric McGlohon <eric at dekard_com>]

So is anyone injecting CO2 into their cichlid tanks?

I was considering this also, but instead opted for Excel (and ~2wpg,
plants are doing great), I'm trying to keep the ph around 8.  I'd
be curious to hear if anyone else is actually doing this, and how
it's working.

-Eric

On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 06:41:07PM -0400, Wayne Jones wrote:
> Paul wrote:
> Right.  The misunderstanding
> above is unfortunately very common, and is to be found in textbooks.
> - ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> You must almost feel like giving up on this one. Every rift lake cichlid
> keeper believes that you cannot get CO2 to disolve in hard water. One of
> the best known internet sites devoted to Rift lake Cichlids even has a
> chemical formula that indicates that the solubility of CO2 decreases
> when water contains high levels of carbonate and therefore you cannot
> disolve CO2 in high carbonate water. If this were true the oceans would
> be in big trouble I think.
> 
> There are other reasons why this is widely believed. I think Rift Lake
> Cichlid tanks are often filled with calcite rocks or coral. When you
> inject CO2 the calcite disolves and raises the KH. It makes it look like
> the CO2 didn't disolve. Another reason is that a lot of pH test kits
> don't work well over the range required to actually see the pH drop.