TDS readings

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Galantspeedz

Potamotrygon
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Feb 28, 2017
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I tried scouring the net for acceptable readings for freshwater aquarium as well as for the fishes i have but can't find any results that is useful

i know what is TDS but not sure how does it help with regards to maintaining good water quality for fishes

what i can say is i did a test before my weekly water change and the results from 3 different tanks are

Arowana, Datnoids, etc comm tank - 150. has 5kg of coral chips. tank size is 6ft x 2ft x 2.5ft
Africa Cichlids comm tank - 176. has lava rocks about 10kg. tank size is 6ft x 2ft x 2ft
Stingray tank - 156. has 5kg of coral chips and 6kg of pumice stone. tank size is 5ft x 3ft x 2ft

Did a test on ammonia, nitrite and nitrates and results were 0,0 and 60-80, 60-80 and 30-40 respectively

Trying to provide as much info as i can

anyone can help on the reading? as i remember some people mentioned they uses TDS to decide if water change is needed
 
Did you ever test your tap water, which I assume is your water source? Then you need to add the same ratio of coral chips to a 1L of water in order to determine what your TDS baseline should be for each tank.

So for your 6x2x2.5 tank (roughly 850 L), the baseline would be 5.88g of coral in 1 litre water. I would circulate that for at least a few days, then measure the TDS.

I try not to be higher than 50ppm TDS from baseline.
 
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TDS is tolerated differently by different fish depending on where they are from, and the waters they have evolved.
African Rift Lake species have evolved in a fairly high density TDS environment, as have brackish water species, even higher. The water of Lake Natron where Alclapia cichlids live would kill many others (it is saltier than the ocean. They did well in my tanks.
Species from the Amazon, and soft water habitats much lower, some down to almost zero.
Coral chips are adding to the TDS of your tanks.
My suggestion would be to to
research the natural waters of the species you keep, and do what you can, with the water you are dealt with.
When I lived in Milwaukee my tap water was quite high in TDS (the MCL for drinking water is 500ppm) and this prevented me from keeping certain sensitive species, (any soft water Amazon species did quite poorly) so I kept only those that would tolerate the higher concentration.
 
duanes duanes the reason i added coral chips was because i realised my PH acutally goes down quite fast between water changes.... before coral chips i needed to do WC every 3-4days... after coral chips... 7-8 days no problem... so far my aro comm with other fishes are doing well as are my rays

Rocksor Rocksor Will do a test on my tap water tonight... if it helps, our water are safe to drink straight from the tap.. i don't think i can measure 6g or coral chips but i will have to do an estimate.. so water + coral chips + air stone for a few days? What is the purpose of this?

Attached is the 2017 water quality report

https://www.pub.gov.sg/Documents/Singapore_Drinking_Water_Quality.pdf

based on the water report.. TDS for our tap water is a average of 146 and range of 96 - 260

Can't find much info on TDS for aquarium, much less specific fishes
 
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By adding extra TDS via coral, you have artificially inflated the TDS value of your aquarium water so you don't know exactly how much organics the fish are adding to your water, hence the reason for adding a small amount of coral to 1L of your tap water.

It's difficult to find what TDS fish dwell in. It's better to look at conductivity, which can be converted to TDS, and the hardness of the water (not PH), which will have a certain TDS value.
 
Agree with Rocksor, and I get the method of using chips if the tap water alkalinity is low, the coral helps prevent pH crash.
For certain sensitive to high TDS (conductivity) type species, the only realistic way to have the best of both worlds, is with excessive water changes.
You can usually find out the normal water parameters of the fish you keep, by googling the parameters of the bodies of water they come from, sometimes takes some digging.
Like Rocksor, I used a conductivity meter to measure my tanks TDS parameters. As you can see below, the related parameters of "conductivity, salinity, and hardness" are quite high, and dictated to me, what fish to keep in my high TDS water.
Central American or African rift cichlids worked well.
South American species such as Uaru fernadenzepizzi or other soft water species of the Amazon were not suitable for my tanks, and I had to adapt.
The trend in tests also showed me how often to do water changes, and how much to change.
 
Wow that's some crazy data... guess I will have to trial and error slowly.. starting with what rocksor suggested and slowly work from there
 
I just measured the tds from the tap and it is 130... for the tds with coral I will have to do it tomorrow
 
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