rodder4hire

I am starting a 70 gallon "high tech" plant tank. Right now there are only a couple of plants and a few (a few less than yesterday) fish.

I am using gravel substrate, T5 lighting at 3.0 wpg, will be injecting CO2 when I get my plants, and plan to use the PPS pro dosing.

My questionis, using a Red Sea test kit, I get a kH of 0. My pH was 6.4. I raised my pH to 8.0 using baking soda, and my kH still reads as 0. As an aside, my gH was 140 ppm before adding the baking soda and killing half of my fish.

Could the test kit be not working??? I never even get the initial color (blue) when I test, it goes right to the pinkish color. I've been considering getting a different brand of kit to verify.

Won't I have difficulty getting CO2 to disolve and stay suspended at such a low kH?

supersmirky

HI rodder...I would say something is wrong with the test kit.

KH of zero after baking soda is very unlikely.

rodder4hire

new kH test showed kH of 8. I have gH of 14 from my tap water. Liquid rock baby! I did a 50% water change to nuetralize the baking soda.

As I want to keep discus in my planted tank later, I'm going to start collecting rainwater to soften things up.

supersmirky

Ouch...that is pretty hard.

How's the plants doing?

rodder4hire

just getting the stuff together - just have a few plants from the tank's previous iteration - no mass of plants yet...