African cichlid water parameters

Deja vu - I'm not sure exactly how the per hydrogen/lime mix. Excellent question by the way - all's I can say is that my tap is 8 ph with crushed corals it's a stable 8.5 and I've never tested the ph immediately after a water change. Nor have a lost a fish due to water changes.......................hoping a more advanced aquarist will answer this question in detail.

I will do the best I can at answering this question. The great rift lakes of africa all have hard alkaline water as you allready know. If I was in your situation with soft acidic water I would definately use some type of a buffering substrate to try to help with the PH issue. I have never been a big fan of the crushed coral substrates as they have a tendency to be quite sharp which when combined with cichlids that digs leads to abrasions on their mouth. I would try to find some of the coral sand or use one of the commercially available substrates that is made specifically for african cichlids. I have a quick question for you to answer for yourself do you have a water softener? Is there a water supply at your house that doesnt go through the softener? At my house the outside hose faucet doesnt go through the softener. Neither does the water supply that I plumbed in for my fish room. With a PH of only 6.8 you are going to have to make some changes to this water. You could put Agricultural Lime in your filters use some pieces of limestone for decoration. The benefits of these are to keep the PH from dropping back down once you have altered it to the desired range. There are also some very good additives that can be used made by Seachem and Kent these will help greatly however they need to be mixed outside the tank. I would try to get that PH at least to 7.2 before keeping african lake cichlids. And 8.0 before trying to keep any Tanganyikans. I would experiment with the water parameters using different buffers until I got it to where I wanted it. I would do these experiments without fish present of course as they may not handle the rapid changes well. once you have found a methed that suits your needs you will need to make these modifications to the water before adding it to the tank otherwise you will use up the buffering capacity of the substrate and still have huge swings every time you change water. A small swing is ok but a swing from 6.8 to 8.0 could cause some huge problems. if you can get it to sit at 7.2 and stay there. then I would be happy with that and try to keep it stable. Although these fish like a higher PH They like stable water the best and hill reward you with good color and health.

Just a side note. If you plan on keeping just your basic Mbuna and not the more delicate and expensive fishes from these lakes anything above 7.0 and stable will do fine. Just remember to mix any additives outside the tank as I added some powdered PH adjuster to a tank with fish once and a bunch of them ate it and some died very quickly.

Yes the old live rock will help but I would soak it for a while in a bucket or something. Live rock will have alot of organic material in it and may add ammonia and nitrite to the aquarium for a while. The old live rock will definately help with cycling the tank though.