Re: Profile

["Wayne Jones" <waj at mnsi_net>]

David wrote:

After adding another spoonful of dolomite and waiting two days, the pH
reads 6.4.  Nitrate is at 70 ppm (no fish), KH is below 0.5 ppm, and
iron reads 0.0 ppm. It really soaks up those cations. It may be that the
fired Profile has H+ attached to the sites, and  when emersed, the H+ is
exchanged for any Ca, K, or Mg ions in the water. One shouldn't have
this problem if the profile is mixed with clay as it is designed to be.

I added Osmocote pellets under substrate and potassium sulfate and
magnesium sulfate to the water. As the fertilizer dissolves, the cations
may be attracted to the Profile exchanging H+ ions to form nitric,
phosphoric, and sulfuric acids in the water column. These will not be
blown off by aeration. There must be a chemist out there who can
enlighten us.

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That sounds like a good theory to me. Although it is not necessarily the
case that the Ca, K and Mg ions are leaving the solution at all. I
reread the previous posts and didn't see anything on a drop in GH. I
don't have that test kit so I don't know. If the GH didn't drop it would
be easy to bring the pH back up with baking soda. There has got to be a
source of acid in there somewhere but that is about the limit of my
chemistry understanding. Maybe Profile is acid washed during
manufacturing and there is some acid residue left over.

I bet Greg Morin knows the answer to this and is probably getting a
chuckle out of it right now. I guess that Profile, although very similar
in apperance to Fluorite, is just not quite the same thing.

I found an analysis of oyster shell and it didn't contain hardly any
magnesium at all. Where can I get dolomite?

Wayne