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How necessary is a ph controller?

2K views 9 replies 7 participants last post by  lksdrinker 
#1 ·
I got one with my GLA co2 system. I am alittle scared I'm going to gas my fish to death. Should I start out running my co2 for 3 hours or will I be ok? My ph right now is 7.4.
 
#2 ·
not necessary at all. I dont know my ph or feel like i need to know my ph. water is water. unless your squeezing lemon juice or dumping baking soda into your water, it shouldn't be swinging PH levels like a bat hitting for home run. your co2 wont affect ph that much. run it with your lights and it should balance out. run it 24/7 like i do and it will still be fine. you will know days beforehand if the fishes will die because they will be gasping at the top of your tank for days and days and days until one day they do die. so you have plenty of warning signal buffer room.
 
#6 ·
Not trying to pick on you, but I just left another thread where you gave out bad advice like it is fact. Your statement is wrong on just about every sentence. The only way that what you're saying could make any sense is if you're talking about DIY CO2, which the OP is definitely not. You're handing out advice that is flat wrong and could cause lots of livestock loss.

You should know your PH
Water is considerably different from place to place.
CO2 levels will affect your PH readings
No need to run CO2 with lights off. It's a total waste
You can gas your fish very quickly, keep a close eye on things whenever you change CO2 levels.
 
#3 ·
Its certainly not necessary. But they arent cheap either so if you already bought one why not use it. Its kind of an insurance policy to make sure you dont gas your fish. Ideally you want to see your ph drop to 6.4 within an hour or so of the co2 running. Most who use a pressurized co2 setup have the co2 run while the tank lights are on (typically anywhere from 6-8 hours) and/or turn on an hour before lights and turn off an hour before lights turn off. Plants really only use the co2 while the lights are on.

But again, you're aiming for a ph drop of 1.0 so using the controller will handle that for you!

not necessary at all. I dont know my ph or feel like i need to know my ph. water is water. unless your squeezing lemon juice or dumping baking soda into your water, it shouldn't be swinging PH levels like a bat hitting for home run. your co2 wont affect ph that much. run it with your lights and it should balance out. run it 24/7 like i do and it will still be fine. you will know days beforehand if the fishes will die because they will be gasping at the top of your tank for days and days and days until one day they do die. so you have plenty of warning signal buffer room.

This is really not good advice all around. knowing PH values can be a very good tool; even more so when used to determine how much co2 you're injecting. Too much co2 can definitely cause a HUGE swing in ph and can easily kill fish......I'll take a guess that you're using the citric acid method vs a pressurized setup? I guess it could be harder to gas your fish this way but comparing it to a pressurized setup is like comparing apples to oranges.

Its like telling a nascar driver you dont think wearing a seat-belt is beneficial and they should ditch all all their helmets and 5 point harnesses since you never saw the need for it when driving to get groceries.

Ideally when running pressurized co2 you want to aim for a ph drop of about 1.0 Using a ph controller is an excellent way to achieve this. I'd never recommend running a pressurized co2 setup 24/7 unless you have a ph controller. You can easily kill your fish quickly and will not necessarily get warnings days ahead of time.

Careful when you give advice....people might actually believe you!
 
#4 ·
No a controller is not needed. However it can be something like other equipment and be a really worthwhile item. Much depends on how and what the other parts of your operation might be. I have had a Milwaukee controller as it came with a used tank and I went with it. It was great to be able to control the PH much easier and with more confidence that I had control of the PH. Water is not just water. Water is often totally different from one side of the street to the other. Water without good buffering may let the PH swing in drastic ways. Read up on the definition of buffer for more insight?
But how necessary the controller, may depend on you as much as the water. Some find their water is very stable and are quite happy using a drop checker to watch for changes. I find judging colors to be very difficult and the drop checkers are very slow to change. That puts me into wanting to replace the controller I sold off. DUMB!
Some things that controllers do are really hard to replace. I like the way I could start at a normal PH and work the setting down in .2 degrees at a time as I watched my fish adapt to the new water situation. I was going with the standard info that African cichlids require high PH and that left me really unsure that I could actually do plants and CO2 with them. It turns out that info is not correct if I gave them time. With the controller, I ran my normal 7.8 down to near 6.8 before seeing stress with the fish. The controller let me then back off to 7.0 on that tank. I could not have done that without a firm reading and quick response from the controller.
Since selling the controller, I have nearly gassed that whole tank, which would not happen if I had been using a controller. The controller shuts off CO2 flow when it gets out of the set range.
A controller can give you a nice firm answer if kept calibrated and also work as a safety net to shut off the CO2 if you get some adjustment way off. I love it and will be getting another soon.
Sometimes when you move, you sell off too much of the "unneeded" junk?
Necessary? NO! Nice? Very much so.
 
#9 ·
I ran a CO2 probe roughly ten years ago and was not very impressed. It drifted over time and required regular cleaning and calibration. Maybe a modern probe in a clean sump will be more reliable, but it feels like an unnecessary point of failure.

The other problem is that pH does not directly measure CO2 concentration. Imagine you decide to put in some rocks, driftwood, or just perform a waterchange. If anything changes the waters buffering capacity, the pH will want to change and the controller will fight it by raising or lowering the CO2 concentration. Everything will look fine as the pH will be steady as a rock, but behind the scenes you have no idea how much CO2 is in the tank.

I'm much more comfortable using a drop checker to directly measure CO2, and there has been some work on electronic CO2 probes to sidestep the pH buffering issue as well.
 
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