On Sat, 6 Mar 2004 22:23:12 -0600, "Rick"
wrote:

Battlelance, just our of curiosity what size tank do you have that you use
this recipe on?. I took a look at it and unless I read it wrong I would have
to add 13 tablespoons of Epsom salts, about 13 teaspoons of baking soda and
13 teaspoons of marine salt to my 66 gallon tank to get my PH and hardness
up to about my current levels.

I use it on an 80 gallon tank. I would have to go dig up my original
calculations to find out how much I would need to add to get it to
where it is now (pH 8.0, KH ~200), because once I got it up to this
level, you just have to maintain it based on the amount of water you
remove from the tank. I do know it was nowhere near your numbers. Did
you actually take a bucket of dechlorinated water and see how many
tsp/tbsp's you would have to add to reach your desired levels? It's
not something you could just guess at.

I'm probably being too picky, since my original pH is ~7.5, and the
africans should handle this just fine, but my KH and GH are 10, and
I really wanted to bring that KH up. I also added crushed coral to the
substrate and in the filter, and I'm currently monitoring the results
to see if I can get a higher pH and KH, without altering the formula I
use for the rift lake buffer recipe.

And hey, it's cheaper than the "rift lake in a bottle" you can buy
from the LFS

Oh, I also wanted to mention that it takes time for the baking soda
and epsom salts to work. I was a tad hasty when I first did my
calculations, and my pH shot up in the tank causing my yellow labs to
start scratching, and they eventually both died. sniff