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I have had a 20 gallon RCS tank for 3 years now. I have moss balls and some JAVA moss, drift wood, and mineral rocks. Only RCS in the tank and some soft shell snails I have in there I breed for my fresh water puffer fish in another tank,. My issue is that the shrimp live 1-2 years and they breed just fine but I never see babies. I see plenty of eggs but never babies. (Well 1 or 2 a month maybe but they disappear) The adults keep going just fine until they die off of old age or something else. I keep about 100 shrimp in the tank and have to replenish 50 every 6 months about. Water Temp I keep about neutral. PH- 7- 7.2 I use distilled water or sometimes Reverse Osmosis water because our tap water goes through a water softener which puts a LOT of salt in it which makes TDS very high so I try not to use tap water at all. I feed every 2 days with Azoo or other good food and not much. Its all gone by the time I feed again. I do add some powder food for the babies and a shrimp bacteria powder (just started that about 6 months ago but has not helped or hurt) Someone told me due to the distilled water my issue is LOW TDS. So I bought TWO different meters. I tested the distilled water and its about zero which is correct. I then tested my water and its about 700. I do top offs and just did a 20% water change last weekend with distilled water. So is that the issue? Should I pull out the mineral rocks? I am thinking tonight to take about 8 gallons of water and drain the tank down about 40% and then fill with the distilled water. I can repeat the process in a week and once I get the TDS under 150 I can add a little shrimp mineral to get it to the 200 range. The reason I am saying that is the TDS could be bad TDS and not the minerals they needs. I ordered some Salty Shrimp Mineral which I heard was good. Should I just give up? Jeff

Hello, So the problem is, that my pH is always rising and settling in the range of around 6.8, but I fail to understand why and I hope you will clarify the problem for me. Let's get into details: I am running inert substrate tanks, which have the following parameters: pH 6.7-6.8, GH 5-6, KH 0-1, TDS ~125. My routine is that I do weekly water changes of around 20%. The water for changes is RO water + salty shrimp GH+ + Azoo Triple Black Water (which is basically a tannins and humic acids extract)+ Azoo Ph Lower, and I usually adjust the pH to around 6.0-6.2 as I want to keep it acidic, but the pH just won't go down lower than 6.7(to be exact - If I would add peat, or a lot of those acids, then sure it would go down lower, but after some time it always comes to it's usual 6.8 range). I also adjust the pH of the top-up water, which is RO + Triple Black Water. As I am adding a lot of acids into the water I thought the pH should stay acidic, unless there is something that absorbs those acids. So I did a test - I have prepared my usual bucket of water, re-mineralised it and adjusted pH to below 6.0 and let the bucket be. After around 24 hours I have measured the pH of the water in the bucket and, the pH was back at around 6.6. So it raised a lot. Once again I lowered the pH to below 6.0 using Triple Black Water only, and after another 48 hours the pH was again 6.8. So why is the pH rising ? I understand that with kH 0 there is nothing to buffer the water, but since I am adding acids into the water and there is nothing that could absorb them what causes the pH to raise ? Thanks !