Vinegar for pH

[Ted L. Dutcher]

The cloudiness from a bacterial bloom is usually very short lived and when it passes, the tanks do become crystal clear. Is not harmful to fish.
Some folks get it from adding driftwood and in some cases just setting up a new tank, the fresh tap water will cloud over for a few days.

In a natural enviroment one would have to assume that the bacterial actions are done while the water is leaching through the peat and leaf litter.

[Nils A. Seastrand]

Many years ago sodium phosphate NaH2 PO4 (monobasic) was commonly used to shift pH to the acid side,and yes, even vinegar and dilute hydrchloric acid were used as quick, but not very permanent, solutions. In my humble opinion, the closer to natural we can get the better the results.Also, remember that naturally derived acids(eg. tannic) address overall water condition and not just pH. —thanks

[Stefanie Rick]

[quote=”seascient” post=1576]In my humble opinion, the closer to natural we can get the better the results.Also, remember that naturally derived acids(eg. tannic) address overall water condition and not just pH. —thanks[/quote]

Yes, I would also prefer the most natural way to acidify water.
But vinegar to me still doesn’t seem to be the most natural way. The water in paro habitats gets it’s special conditions by seeping and trickling through dead plant material on the forest grounds. So for me the next idea to using peat was to try in which way water is affected by bark. I steeped pure pine bark (which I normally use as orchid soil) in rain water. After a week the conductivity hadn’t changed, but the ph-level went from 6 to 5. This effect lasts for a few weeks. This pine bark is very clean and dry – I haven’t tried it with the (in most cases) wet and decaying bark chips which are sold as “bark mulch”.

But clean or not – I think acidifying water by using bark comes closer to natural than using vinegar ………..

[Patrick Guhmann]

I use peat and I am very satisfied with it. I think bacteria (harmful or harmless)reduces oxygen in the water and we should avoid very low oxygen contents.

[Peter Finke]

Peat certainly is best since it’s the way nature chooses herself in the homelands of our fish. But there are three problems:

1. It is always risky to buy peat in a shop for gardening. Often, fertilizers are mixed in but not openly declared. At any rate you must avoid this.

2. Peat isn’t peat. There are many different sorts of peat. Once you buy a peat that reduces the pH very efficiently; that should be the case. But then there is peat that has no value at all; it’s filtering function is not better than using an old doorscraper. You must look for the first mentioned, but often you receive the second only declared in the highest notes of appraisal. If you buy those small rounded pellets from the pet shop trade you are mostly on the safe side; mostly.

3. The most serious point is: Peat is a product from bogs and moors. And we rightly protest against the heavy use of it in gardening. There are substitutes for it for that purpose, but the commerce goes on. But it’s a problem, too, that we protest against the destruction of the peat bogs in south-east Asia but again use peat from our countries, participating in the destruction of our peat-bogs for establishing nice aquariums.

Now, one could say: But it’s so little a quantity! Gardening with peat is a big business, but using a small amount for a Paro-tank is negligible. Well, I leave it to you to valuate this argument. I am much in favour of those aquarists who for that reason look for other methods in our hobby, too. For instance using alder-cones, or oak-leaves, or oak-extracts or even acids (not vinegar, of course!). The results of these alternative methods are good.

Nevertheless I think that really acid peat is very good indeed. Maybe there are further ingredients that we don’t really know that add to the function we are here speaking about.

[bartian]

What you mention is one of the reasons I am looking for an alternative for peat. At the moment I mostly use oak leaves and some peat I bought long ago, but I don’t want to buy new peat. That would be hypocritical.
It is of course a small quantity, but a lot of small stones make a mountain.

You said the main reason for acidifying water is the anti-bacterial and anti-fungal effect of low pH. At university where I am studying I learn that fungi grow optimally at low pH. In a practical course we had to grow yeast from orchard soil in medium with pH 4,5. This, coincidentally, is the pH I like to keep my paros at. How does this correspond to what you said? Is it only the bacteria that matter then? In that case, couldn’t we just pour in some kind of antibioticum? And do you know which specific bacteria are harmful for our paros?

With google I found this article. In this experiment the researchers examined relationship between soil pH and bacterial and fungal growth. Apparently at pH 4 bacterial growth declined with 90% with respect to pH above 7. Fungal growth, on the other hand, showed a maximum at pH 4,5(and declined sharply at pH 4!).
As I said before, bacteria and fungi should not be generalised, so generally reduced bacterial and fungal growth does not mean the harmful organisms in question are inhibited by (very) low pH. Also, English soil is not the same as a Bornean swap. Still, I find this quite interesting.

[Maciej]

Using acidic water is important for digestion, skin mucus (actually removing the part that is not required), skin itself (as it is uncomfortable for the fish to have the pH set to high) and so on..

Of course there are some bacteria and fungi in this water. There is a stream, somewhere in Europe, where pH drops as low as 2! And there is still presence of some lifeforms.

The differnce between Bornean swamp and British soil is the insanely thick layer of peat over the aquifer. In such a situation there are almost no bacteria or fungi that are able to travel through the peat barrier, as opposite to the soil, where the transfer of mikrobes is easy becouse of almost stable pH throughout the whole volume of the soil. In case of the peat-barrier the pH changes drasticly from neutral to very acidic, so many bacteria and fungi are killed in the process.

At least this is what I read and got from my deduction.

[Ted L. Dutcher]

This has been a very good and enightning discussion.

I have been using Canadian Peat Moss and originally thought it was not very acidic.

Have discovered that if I saturate it, let it sit 2 weeks or so and then I run RO water and percolate the peat in an old electric coffee maker, I get good acidic water, low TDS and very nice tannic acid from it.

It’s so dark sometimes that I pour 11 cups of percolated into 4 gallons of RO water.

Now I’m getting a fairly stable mix of the range of pH 5 to 5.5

The pH does creep up slowly since I cant replicate a Malasian swamp for constant flow seepage, but it is easy to control.

[Peter Finke]

Contrary to many other discussions we had in this forum, this has developed to a very sophisticated level. We arrive at the border of our knowledge, at least mine. But I think it is not mine alone. The mechanisms of the participation of bacteria and funghi in creating, stabilizing and destabilizing a possible aquarium milieu are definitely poorly understood hitherto. The aquarium literature is to 95% a hobby literature on practice; all theory and too much science is avoided. There is little research in this field, apart from the specialists, but they are not interested in aquaria but in the general problems.

What I told here is the result of a long experience, not of investigations or even systematical tests of my own. I found it very useful to accidentally control the amount of “germs” by the practical kits that are available presently, although they are neglected by the bulk of the hobbyists and are not manufactured and sold by the aquarium industry. The thousands of “normal” aquarists don’t need them; we do, I think. And I found that there was a clear interrelation between the germ-density and the pH: low-low and high-high. This includes – to my experience – not only bacteria but funghi too. But this is a rather general statement, I admit. There are certainly differences between the development of bacteria and of funghi in the line of changing pH. In some of those kits both could be distinguished, in others not. I cannot reply to the argument that the funghus maximum may be at a pH about 4.5; I only presume that we have to distinguish between funghi and funghi as we have to distinguish between bacteria and bacteria.

If you breed e.g. P. parvulus, not the easiest species of all, then you see this interrelations very clearly. In the beginning, one of our best breeders, Günter Kopic, was successful with this species only with a pH around 3.0, sometimes less. When I tried it first, a pH of 4.5 was not low enough, and the test of the germ density showed still too many of them. The eggs did not develop. Then I lowered the pH to 3.5 and it worked. I know that there are breeders of parvulus with no problems at a pH of 6.0 or slightly more, but it was exceptional; obviously for a certain time the germ activity was not as developed as they were later on, and then the border was crossed.

I am not able to go into details further; I think w e are not able to do so. We could do it theoretically or by analogy with experiments with yeast from English orchards, but what does that prove? At least it’s difficult to tell, too difficult for me at least. But therefore I like this discussion very much; it’s scratching at the border of our knowledge. That’s fine.

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