How to keep Ph stable

[Man-made Monsters]

Hello surfermike915 to a fellow jersey shore MFK member. I live just outside of LBI. My water is hard, mineral heavy, and comes out the tap around 7.2-7.4 PH. I get calcium stains on any surface that my tap water spends time on. My water doesn’t hold a stable ph well on its own so I use a few handfuls of crushed corral in my filters to hold my 180 gallon tank at a PH of 7.5. I have been doing this for the last 16 years with great success and have enjoyed breeding Central Americans and watching them grow big, healthy, and old.

 

[surfermike915]

thank you very much to every one who has commented and also greetings fellow new jerseyian! I am also dealing with a good amount of extremely annoying hard water stains. any advice for them?

 

[duanes]

Just a little FYI.
Some people think lots of water changes make a tank unstable
but.....
lets look at the logic.
If you do 1 water change every 2 weeks, and your tap is 7.8, there are 2 weeks for nitrate and other metabolism byproducts to push pH down, might even go to 6.8 (10 times more acidic than right after a water change).
But....If you do a water change, and right after the is pH 7.8, but then do a moderate water change 2 days later, metabolism may have only dropped the pH to 7.6,
That new water change brings pH back to 7.8, so if you continue with this regime, pH always remains 7.8 to 7.6, back to 7.8.

What is more stable, 7.6 to 7.8 or the long wait between water changes of 7.8 dropping to 6.8?

These ranges will all of course depend on the alkalinity of your tap water, higher alkalinity means less fluctuation as calcium neutralizes metabolism created acids, and may give you some wiggle room.