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fw:re: pH going down

----- forwarded message ----->
Message-Id: <199505242205.RAA26411@tlsun5a.itg.ti.com>
From: DAWB.DSKPO33B at DSKBGW1_ITG.ti.com (David Webb)
Date: Wed, 24 May 1995 17:02 CST
To: Aquatic-Plants at ActWin_com
Subject: re:Urgent help needed!!! PH going downnn....

>>Subject: Urgent help needed!!! PH going downnn....

Hi everybody,

I need urgent help and advised about how to control my PH. It keeps 
going down. I thought it was the drift wood that causing the problem but
turned out to be not. My PH is going down by 0.5 a day. Below is a run
down of events to help in your analysis(?). I add half teaspoon of 
Natrium Bicarbonate last night. Is this the right thing to do? Can I put 
limestone rock in the tank? etc....<<<

This is a possibility:

Your plants may be de-calcifying the water.  Actually, this should be 
de-carbonating the water IMO, but this is the term.

My reccomendation is for you to get a hardness test kit.  You would be
primarily interested in KH, as this is your alkaline buffering
capacity.  If your KH is very low, your problem is explained.

Some plants, in the absence of enough free carbon dioxide in the
water, are capable of removing dissolved carbonates from the water to
provide their carbon needs.  Others can't.  This may also explain your
poor plant performance.  This is measurable as a drop in your KH.

If you find that this is the case, you can add buffers to bring your
KH back up where you want it.  Natrium (Sodium) bicarbonate is fine
for this purpose.  If you want to address the problem at the source,
you might then look into CO2 injecting your tank so the plants won't
take this drastic measure.  Note: you may need to balance your KH with
your CO2 injection rate to get your pH to average out where you want
it to stay.

This is only one possibility.

Hope this helps,

David W. Webb
Enterprise Computing Provisioning
Texas Instruments Inc.
(214) 575-3443 (voice)		MSGID:		DAWB
(214) 575-4853 (fax)			Internet:	dwebb at ti_com
(214) 581-2380 (pager)		Text Pager:	pgr at msg_ti.com Subj:PAGE:David 
Webb


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