Likely. A lot of different rocks are sold as Seiryu stone, dragon stone also. Put some in a bucket of RO with no other variables and see if KH or TDS changes after 24 hours. If it does, that's the culprit.

 

If it's seiryu (which it probably is), your KH (as mentioned) will go way up with so little water and so much stone. I have about 13 pounds in my 12g and it raises KH from 4 to 11 before a water change.

 

K so here's my parameters. Just continue to just do water changes with pure RO then?

FYI the ppm translation is
GH - 6.35
KH - 7.212

Hadn't changed the meter to auto convert to GH and KH.

 

You do the water changes to control it, but KH will keep raising if you don't do the water changes.

 

Ah ok. Right now because it's new tank I'm doing my usual 2x per week wc and now I'm wondering if I'm gonna have to keep that up forever because of the high kh.

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Yes, very much so. The white in sieryu stone is essentially calcium. You have to keep up on water changes with them or the tds can get incredibly high.

Alsp, high co2 injection makes the water more acidic which speeds up how fast the stones dissolve.

 

Yeah it definitely is the Seiryu stone that spikes the TDS. Tank is like 40% stone too so that doesn't help lol. I watched a video from Green Aqua where they say that their tanks that have Seiryu as the hardscape they don't remineralize and just throw pure RO in them.

Figured I will just stick to 2g water change 3x a week which also coincides with my dosing. There is definitely something to this though as I am pushing a ton of light and have yet to see a single piece of algae growing. Could also be that my emersed plants are also taking up the excess nutrients but who knows.

 

Due to your response I'm assuming you think that'd a high tds due to GH (calcium in the seiryu stone) would cause algae.

From my experience high calcium doesn't cause algae on its own. You need high NPK in the first place to do that.

What harder or softer water does (high GH, and therefor tds) is make certain aquatic plants grow better if they are typically found in hard water conditions in the wild. Soft water plants typically don't change their growth pace even if the water is hard though. This is thought to be because they just don't require the gh minerals to grow whereas hard water plants obviously rely on them.

One way plants adapted for hard water use gh minerals is by reacting them near the leaves to convert certain substances into... co2 I think it was.

 

What is often missed and not mentioned in much of what we read is that water does vary all over the world and that means plants have adapted to prosper in the water in their location. High TDS, hard alkaline water does not keep plants from growing, it just makes it difficult for us to move soft water plants into hard water anc get the same lush growth like we see in the limestone springs in places like Texas, Missouri, Florida or much of the Central US where limestone is the dominate rock underground.
So you get the choice, choose fish and plants to match the water or expect to do a full time fight to change the water to match your fish and plants.
When faced with going the easy way and working with nature, I choose that over fighting nature as it has lots more time and talent than I expect to find!
Insight into nature in limestone: