KH4 distilled water

**alechim** · 19th Feb 2008, 11:38

I had just bought the dropchecker from biotope yesterday, so a small query is:

Is it necessary to up the KH of the distilled water to 4? Because my tank's PH level is 6.4, and to attained a 30ppm CO2, i need a KH of 2.5 instead. So can I say in this instance I need to put bi-carbonate into the distilled water to achieve KH 2.5 instead?

**moonstone** · 19th Feb 2008, 12:42

Normally I will bring the distill water to hardness 4dKH and then put into the drop checker, drop the reagent into the drop checker then put the drop checker into the fish tank. After 2 hrs or more, the blue liquid in the drop checker will change into green color if 30ppm of CO2 is present in the water. If it still blue then you will have to increase the CO2. If yellow decrease the CO2. You can also make 5dKH if you intend to bring CO2 to 40ppm. Normally I don't use my fish tank water as my fish tank water has impurities. The drop checker instruction is to use your aquarium water, that is fine if your aquarium water contains no other buffering agents.

**alechim** · 19th Feb 2008, 13:59

Okie. So we do not really care about the PH level of my tank's water lah?
Just mixed the distill water to KH4 and use it on the drop checker?

**moonstone** · 19th Feb 2008, 14:56

Not to say we disregard the PH value in the aquarium water. The aquarium water must have the PH that is suited to the type of fishes you have.

**alechim** · 19th Feb 2008, 18:18

roger!thanks!

**zephyros** · 22nd Jun 2008, 10:14

Hi bros,

happens to come across this thread.
I'm assuming that the origin of this thread is to use distilled water for water change.

Questions - I'm a total newbie

1) Do you mean that if we are using tap water, we do not need to bring up the KH4?
2) If we are doing a small amount of water change, say 10%, with distilled water,
do we still need to bring up the KH4? Wont it be stablize in the main tank?

Cheers

**Shadow** · 22nd Jun 2008, 11:16

did your tak planted? if yes then you should not use distiled water. If you do want to use distile water you need to add some mineral inside like seachem equilibrium.

For drop checker, we use kH 4 solution and not from tank water is to make sure that the pH measured is purely from CO2 and not other stuff in the tank.