So am I, but welcome, mate! I would dearly love to visit your magnificent country and dive the Great Barrier Reef. I might not come home.
the severe care for ph. The way I was taught to reef originally many years ago was ph super important.
Well, it is. In aqueous solutions, pH / pOH is the driving force behind the speed with which all ionic reactions occur, or whether they occur at all. The problem, for the aquarium enthusiast, is the pH can suffer wide swings in a very short time due to environmental factors that can and do change on an hourly basis, or even less. The aquarium enthusiast is generally much better suited to try to target more stable metrics so as to provide a metastable environment. Some of the folks here have assumed I did not know this. Why they did so, I have no idea. One should never assume anything, at least not without specifically documenting the assumption. If any proof is incorrect, it is usually because one or more of the postulates is incorrect.
Then it was keeping alkalinity, calcium, mag, salinity, oxygen and temperature were the main things alongside nitrate and phosphate.
O2 also quite normally varies throughout the day, as does CO2. The "trick" if you will, is to try to arrange it so both are continuously near optimal levels throughout the day. The bottom line is one should not be continually messing with the aquarium environment. It is often going to wind up doing more harm than good. This is why focusing on more generally stable parameters is a good idea. What's more, some of them do affect pH, and keeping them in an optimum range will go a long way toward keeping the pH range within tolerable parameters. Note in the wild, the pH is ordinarily much more stable, although even there it fluctuates a little daily. It is one of the parameters we evaluated very closely when I was part of a scientific team evaluating the health of the marine environment and the impacts of certain activities in the Gulf of Mexico.
And ph was something we just completely forgot about and nothing bad happened and the way it was explained to me was simply that if my alk and oxygen was stable and fine than ph would never be an issue.
The first problem is, this is not always true. I submit the second problem is a number of people have it ingrained in their minds it must always be true.
It is about buffering. What is a chemical buffer? It is a substance which, when added to an aqueous solution, prevents the pH of the solution from changing as much when other chemicals are added as much as it would when the same amount of said chemicals are added to pure water. Buffers are usually created by adding a weak acid or a weak base along with one or more of its salts to the initial reagent solution. Then, when an acid or a base, even a strong acid or base, is added to the solution, the pH change is far, far less than that of adding the same amount of the same chemical to pure water. The term "water hardness" is very loosely used to cover a number of quite different situations, but generally speaking, hard water is fairly heavily buffered, and so it has a much more stable pH than pure water.
What that means for the aquarium enthusiast is harder water in general is going to have a much more stable pH. With that in mind, keeping a handle on alkalinity will reduce the swings in pH for a given change in constituent bases and acids, and consequently keeping an eye on dKH will
USUALLY, indeed almost always keep pH in line. The problem here is "almost always" is not the same as "always". It would seem many people also fail to realize "in every case I have seen" is not the same as "always", either.
And to run my thoughts around in circles again mostly on the Facebook page I see people chasing a ph and doing all these crazy things.
Back in the 70s, I was having a conversation with an Oceanographer friend whose job was maintaining a large number of marine aquaria for his department in the university. I had one 30g fish-only aquarium in my apartment. When I would come back from sea duty, I would sometimes being back one or two specimens with me. It was often a chore keeping them alive. His response was, "It's really amazing any fish can ever survive in an aquarium." Fortunately, life is pretty tough.
Long story short ph is obsolete at least in my local circles and on the interwebz I've been seeing a lot of craziness in chasing a ph and probably throwing everything else out of wack in the process
Like I did. As I said, I rather panicked, and not having enough of the right chemistry tests to hand, I did the wrong thing. Had I known the hardness was already high, I would never have added more 8.3 buffer. I would have gone straight to vinegar, and then to NaOH as soon as I could get some, which would have been four days. Note the problem as far as the sick fish were concerned was indeed pH, but the root cause was not low alkalinity, as I incorrectly surmised. Basically, I was guilty of the same assumption others here have made: low pH is the result of low alkalinity.
