using white vinigar to lower PH?

[vince]

Hi, all:

What do you guys think using (homebrand) white vinigar to lower tap water PH. I live in Brisbane (around CBD). The water here is pretty hard for discus and with a PH 7.8, i was thinking about using white vinigar instead of discus buffer, cheaper and easier to get....

what do you guys think? anyone tried this before? I suppose organic acid is more effective than inorganic acid, although phosphate may present, i do not use that in my plated tank anyway, only for discus tank.

many thanx

vince

[Professor_J]

Hi.

It won't work. Apart from the fact that it may have some toxicity issues with the fish (I'm not sure on that one but I wouldn't be surprised by them), vinegar (acetic acid) is volatile, so your bubbler and natural partitioning with air will slowly remove it. Plus it will be metabolized by some of the bacteria or trapped by carbon if you have it in your filter, so again it will be removed quite quickly from the tank.

There won't be any phosphate in the vinegar so you don't need to worry about that.

To drop the pH without having anything go too goofy you essentially need sulfate to be added. Either as straight sulfuric acid or more typically things like pH down which is sodium hydrogen sulfate (NaHSO4) (but read the ingredients on the bottle carefully. Some of them have phosphate salts or other things in there too. Those won't be good to use).

[samir]

bacteria bloom, cloudy water.

[Ben]

hydrochloric acid works (spelling?)

If i remember correctly 1ml to 200 litres of water will lower water from 7.4 to 6.4.

I have to double check my notes though..

[samir]

HCl is the most cost effective, best to test water in a barrel for a few days, if your water is very soft like mine you will require a very tiny dose. be careful with conc HCl.
Xtreme has got a liquid (finally) ph down that contains dilute H2SO4, 4.8% I think. One bottle could last you a year with a single tank.

[fishgeek]

i wouldnt use sulphuric acid, sulphates are not great fro fish

better to use hydrochloric acid if wonting to add H+ ions to lower pH

and much better to do this in a bucket of water with no fish, pH will drop then rise , so leave it to settle and measure before assesing what level of acid you may require, obvously will be dependant on buffers/kH in your source water

if very little buffer than natural acids tannic/fulvic/hummic of peat will be safer and sufficent

andrew

[ozarowana]

IMO I would only play with pH if you have a digital pH meter.

Brisbane water shouldn't be that hard. I think it has a general hardness of about 120ppm which is moderately soft. Your fish should be fine at a pH of 7.8.

My water on the northside is a bit different to the majority of brisbane. It has a pH of 8.5 and contains nitrite.

I've found that if you adjust with HCl to the desired pH, the nitrification process will crash your tank pH after a couple of days. This depends on bioload etc but should be ok if you change water daily.

You want to add less HCl and leave some buffering capacity. The pH will drift down slower and you can bring it back up slightly with the next water change.

As a guideline I use to add 40mL pool HCl to 220L and that changed pH from 8.5 to about 7.1, but this crashed once in a tank situation.

I now add 20mL to 220L. It doesn't change the pH much in the barrel, but in the tanks the pH sits around 6.5 to 7.0 depending on when I last changed the water.

HTH