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Does anyone has any experience using malic acid to drop pH down? Any suggestion would be appreciated.
Warm regards,
TautvilasApple cider vinegar? I think that’s not a good idea, mixing vinegar can always be contaminated with other ingredients. Better is pure acid, hydrochloric acid or oak extract. If you give a lot of oak leaves in the aquarium, the pH value remains quite stable.
Agreed with Bernd. You can use what he says or alder cones, all these are at hand and completely natural, easy to work with. If you have pure malic acid, it would work as any other acid, but I would go for the stuff that naturally occures in the water.
Malic acid is not the same as vinegar. I have pure white powder acid. Actually this acid occurs naturally in all fruits. So this is also a natural source of acid. Drop a fruit into river, and here an acid play a role. I will play around with it.. Thank you 😉
Do it but be careful, it could bleach or preservatives may be included.
Alder cones, peat and oak leaves go.Of course it occures in nature but if you have a look at the composition of all the substances that makes water acidic on Paro’s localities, it will be a negligible part of all these. If you have p.a. or some other very pure quality substance, as I said, you may probably use it as any other acid. I say probably as it’s anion is a part of cycrate cycle. I am not sure about how these are capable to penetrate cell membranes if in high concentration, so it could be dangerous to some extend. Paros are capable to handle extreme concentration of complex macro and micromolekules of humic and fulvic acids, but these are proven to be good for cell metabolism. I think high concentration of malic acid in the environment is at the very least not phisiological.
Although I agree with Bernd as far as natural substances should be preferred: I, for my part, tend to reduce my pH by using an acid as well. But istead of an organic acid I chose 98 per cent phosphoric acid which I got from a local pharmacy (I was rather surprised that one can by such stuff so easily. And I was even more surprised when the pharmacist sold me 1 litre (!) of it as no smaller packages were available.)
Up to now I mix one pipette drop to five litres of R/O water, reducing the pH from ~6.2 to ~5.4 but with now significant effect on EC (R/O: 30µS, R/O + acid: 30-40µS).Yes, given that you don’t need to fight with any kind of alkalinity, the amount of acid needed to drop the pH down is very small and even strong anorganic acids that dissociate to high extend do not raise the conductivity much. I do not use it with Paros but I do with other fish that can’t stand that many humic substances with the same results. Sulphuric acid will raise the conductivity about the same,around 5 µS one drop in 5 liters. For Paros I use alder cones extract as I work with lower conductivity water at the start and alder cones extract is able to raise it a little. I soak big handfull of cones in 1 liter of RO water for about a day, this way I get extract that has something like 60 µS and I use 1/2 liter of it for every 5 liters of water. For having enough humic substances I sometimes use this: http://www.amagro.com/aquaristic.html as it is a pure humic/fulvo acids extract prepared from waste material after production of paper. This way no peat is used and you do not support destruction of peat bogs + it is free of heavy metals and other harmfull substances that acumulate in peat. The dosage is 2.5 ml/100 liters so one bottle lasts you for ages.
So I have tried to test with malic acid.
I took 500ml RO water (19 TDS), put some malic acid to drop pH to from 6,8 to 4,8 pH, and got 26 TDS.I forgot about htis thread.
So after some tests, I made a decision not to use malic acid for parosphromens tanks as pH is not stable. This acid works for the first day, later pH readings grow up.. To keep pH down I use ortophosphoric acid with humic acid extract along with leaves, peat granulate and alder cones at my aquariums. 😉
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