Maintaining a 7.0 pH in a freshwater system with a drip

[RequiemTCE]

Checking back in!

So I increased the drip to 12GPH and the pH sits around what I consider to be an acceptable 6.6-6.7. The problem is, my fish all start getting sick after about 7-10 days and developing white fuzzy looking stuff. After treating them a couple times, I realized that it wasn't an infection, it was actually that something in the drip water is eroding their slime coat, or that 250g+ per day in a ~550g system of pure filtered water is perhaps not allowing other important things to build up(the catalyzed activated carbon in the Chloramines Monster takes care of chloramines, but it also removes anything else carbon would remove and then some).

I've been through the cycle where I leave the drip on until they look sick, then turn it off until they look better(about a week both ways) several times now to confirm what the problem is.

For now, I've bought a kilogram of Safe and am dosing each of the 3 tanks with enough to treat 50g every day and have been doing that with the drip on(after a drip off cycle) and after about a week one of the fish is starting to show signs of the problem coming back. I'm going to try increasing the daily dosage of Safe for now, but I decided to necro this thread to see if anybody has any other ideas.

 

[RequiemTCE]

Also, assuming that increasing the dosage of Safe is effective(it does seem to be blunting the progression at the dosage I'm using right now), does anybody know what the "electrolytes that promote fish to produce slimecoat" within Prime/Safe are? Could I just be dosing with normal aquarium salt instead, or some other product that is only intended to promote slime coat growth? I don't need it to remove chlorines/chloramines/ammonia/nitrites/nitrates.

Thanks!

 

[RequiemTCE]

Also, assuming that increasing the dosage of Safe is effective(it does seem to be blunting the progression at the dosage I'm using right now), does anybody know what the "electrolytes that promote fish to produce slimecoat" within Prime/Safe are? Could I just be dosing with normal aquarium salt instead, or some other product that is only intended to promote slime coat growth? I don't need it to remove chlorines/chloramines/ammonia/nitrites/nitrates.

Thanks!

Cmon guys, API and other people have been selling products that promote slime coat growth for decades. I'm not saying that any random person should know this, but if every company knows what is required to promote slime coat growth, nobody here knows?

It just seems unlikely.

And beyond that, anybody with a freshwater system should want a pretty substantial drip, in a dream ideal situation. Good enough, taking dilution theory into account, to exchange 100% of the water in a 1 week period, which extrapolates out to about 50% of the combined system volume per day if you're diluting via a drip.

So that means that according to dilution theory, if you want to exchange ~100% of your water every 1 week, you need to exchange ~50% of your total system volume per day. At least at a ~500g total system volume.

And it turns out that it's not a real big deal to do that, even with a 500g system that's only just over 10g/hr. In Portland, OR, that's about $1/day. Quite an extreme bargain when compared with trying to do manual water changes to that extent, in my opinion.

I feel like I'm pretty close to the holy grail here: "Just add food and scrape algae as necessary for aesthetic reasons". I just need to get past this final hurdle of the water actually being too pure for the fish to stay healthy.

 

[rodger]

I don't think you are taking sewer charge into consideration. For me for every 1000 gal of water I change at $7 I pay $23 in sewer charges. That doesn't matter if it goes on the lawn in a swimming pool or down the drain.

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[DB junkie]

I wish I had advice for you, but I've dripped (poured? lol) well over my system volume in a day and have never seen the kind of stuff you're describing.

I "flush" tanks by running a 1/4 line wide open for days at a time and have seen no ill effects.

I have had this so called holy grail of no water changes and it doesn't work like people think. Stuff builds up. My PH probe is reading 9 right now, .5 HIGHER then my source water, so I'm going back to manual water changes.

 

[RequiemTCE]

I don't think you are taking sewer charge into consideration. For me for every 1000 gal of water I change at $7 I pay $23 in sewer charges. That doesn't matter if it goes on the lawn in a swimming pool or down the drain.

Sent from my SCH-S960L using MonsterAquariaNetwork App

Indeed.

I have it going into my garden; The biggest, plumpest, tomatoes, blueberries, and squash/zucchini/peppers you've ever seen.

I've got a lot of LARGE stock between the 3 tanks and the poor 11" afrowana growing in the shared sump(he's growing in the sump because he will get eaten at 11" in the tank I want him in, if that tells you anything...); I feed about 50 massivore, 50 bio-gold, 50 "Jumbo Fish Formula" NLS, 25 large sally's krill, 10 large sally's silversides, 2 6" herring, 10 of the big hikari algae wafers, and 10 nightcrawlers per day. Lots of fertilizer.

 

[RequiemTCE]

I'd like to add that I only feed them that much when the drip is on, and I know from extensive testing that it's basically impossible, no matter how much I feed them, to make ammonia/nitrite/nitrate even show up on any of the tests that I have.

And also that I've tried not feeding that much when the drip is on, they still get sick and fuzzy, in the same amount of time.

 

[DIDYSIS]

Can I see your PH chart from your apex please. I want to determine if I see what I am thinking.


Here is mine, only reason mine dropped so low last nigh was that I fed a really really lot of food, 7 full tilapia fillets and some shrimp and pellets, Darn pregnant females need allot of food and usually do so once a week, but as you can see still really did not drop down very much. The key is the difference between the high and low number, my system really does not change much at all with the drip and my bio reactor.