Exhausting soil substrate - neocaridina

[sdlTBfanUK]

It is probably too early to start this but as I have no idea really what I am doing I thought it a good idea to maybe get others thoughts/ideas from the beginning?

The aim is to find out if I can reduce the life of the 'buffering' of soil substrates for anyone wanting to use soil substrate with cherry shrimps which do better at higher PH than buffering substrates run, until they are exhausted, and before they get shrimps in the tank - that can't be many people I know???

I set up a betta tank mid March and the buffering with the JBL substrate stopped about 4 months later., though you may be able to knock off a month as I was only doing part (25%) water changes?  Obviously no one wants to wait that long so I am just trying this experiment as I have 2L of shrimp king soil left over anyway. that I won't use!

At the moment I have put 5L dechlorinated tap water in a bucket with 1L of substrate. The tap water is PH7.5 (KH3, TDS 154) and I am planning to do 50% water changes twice a week until the PH gets back to the 7.5 at which point I can assume it is exhausted? I will then try the same experiment using PH+ to see if that will speed up the process, but I haven't ordered that just yet?

Any suggestions, am I doing it correctly, does it even make any sense?

So this should give me an idea of how long it will take to stop buffering just using tap water but doing twice weekly 50% water changes, and then whether using PH+ would speed it up notably?

This is just to get an idea, and different soil substrates will probably be different so I am not really looking for a definite answer as to the time length etc, more an idea as to whether either of these will work well for others in the future that want to keep cherry shrimp with the soil substrates. Having said that I have always kept cherry shrimp in lower than recommended PH (to start wirh) without a problem anyway?

Simon 

 

[jayc]

Cool experiment.

But PH+ products are just Bicarbonate of Soda. Go get it from your local supermarket for a tenth of the price of a PH+ product.

 

[sdlTBfanUK]

Is that all it is, I will see if I can get some from the supermarket. 

Thanks for that JayC!

Simon

[jayc]

1 hour ago, sdlTBfanUK said:

Is that all it is

Yep, some products might dilute it for you into a liquid form, which means you get more water than bicarb.

You might already have it in the kitchen.

Edited October 26, 2019 by jayc