Fish For High Ph

What is the pH of your tapwater, both freshly drawn and a some that has stood for 24 hours? You may well find they are different.

Next question, how hard is your water? It should be somewhere on your water supplier's website. Does your shower head/kettle get furred up - that indicates hard water.

If you have hard water you are likely to have high carbonate hardness (KH) as well which means it will be tricky for you to alter the pH. Carbonate buffers the water against changes in pH so adding chemicals to lower pH is not an option. The only way would be to mix your tapwater with RO water (reverse osmosis, water that has had all the minerals removed) or to use pure RO with soft water-level minerals added back in. The fish available to us can't survive in pure water so even soft water fish must have a small amount of minerals added back.


The bad news is that german rams prefer soft acid water. If your water turns out to be hard as well as alkaline, they won't do well. But there are fish that like hard alkaline water. The most obvious ones (Rift Lake cichlids) aren't suitable for a tank your size.

Hardness is more important than pH. If you get fish that suit your hardness, even if their preferred pH is slightly out, they'll do better than fish of the 'correct' pH but 'wrong' hardness.

Assuming you do have hard water:
Livebearers prefer hard alkaline water but they tend to be darting about fish. Guppies and endlers are the commonly available species suitable for your tank size, but only males or you'd soon
be over populated.
There are some fish not in the profiles on here, I'll give you the links to Seriously Fish.

Celebes rainbowfish, also here
Possibly threadfin rainbows and here
Fish of the genus Pseudomugil - the ones I've seen in the shops are P. gertrudae and P. furcatus.
Emerald rasboras and various other common names.
Just a few suggestions.


And of course if it turns out you have middling or even soft water, they won't do and we'll have to think of something else.

Would any of the dwarf cichlids work, liked the last two on your list as well.

That hardness is not terribly hard. It was your pH that has me worried  In some regions of the UK (the south east for example) they have high pH and water that I've seen described as liquid rock it is so hard, and I couldn't be sure yours isn't the same.
In that case, you can look at a wider range of fish. Those on my list still apply, but you can include other species as well such as those that like middling hard water and highish pH. I'm afraid that still rules out most fish that come from south America as the rivers there are very soft with low pH and the fish have evolved for that kind of water.

I have a hardness of 6 and a pH of 7.5. I can keep some soft water fish, those with a water preference that goes a bit higher than just soft. If you want to look at dwarf cichlids, see Apistogramma borellii as the one that can cope with higher pH and hardness. Apistogramma cacatuoides might be OK and are easier to find in shops. Although Bolivian rams and kribensis would be OK in your water, they do need a bigger tank than 60 litres.



And the reason I suggested testing your tap water after 24 hours is to get a base line reading for your tank. The water in there isn't freshly drawn  If it is different from your tank water there must be something in your tank altering it. Since you have middling hard water, it is possible that 'stood' tapwater is lower than your tank, and something is pushing it up. But then again, you might have middling hardness and high pH naturally.

Limpopo sand should be neutral and not affect pH. It depends on what pebbles you have, but river pebbles are pretty always neutral as well, any chalk or limestone tends to dissolve in river water and those pebbles rarely exist in rivers. 

I guess one should never trust the supplier whatever they say 

Do they really bring sand all the way from the Limpopo!! Or is it just a name? Maybe there's real neutral Limpopo sand and stuff dyed to look like it.

I know people buy "black" sand as some fish are said to prefer a dark substrate, but I reckon that's less important than a dark background and plenty of plants to make a fish feel secure. I don't believe a dark substrate helps if you have clear glass on all sides of a fairly bare tank.

I'd never buy sand from an aquarium supplier, super cheap lime-free silver sand (which is actually quite dark when wet) from the garden centre has served me very well for all my tanks at very little cost. I get stones and pebbles from my allotment, I have to dig them out anyway, so why not use them. I do have Hydrochloric acid to hand to test them with, but the only ones that have effervesced were those that were obviously chalk or limestone just by looking at them.

Considering the crappy advice fish shops give out about fish, I'm not convinced their knowledge of sand is likely to be any better.

My interest is always in making things look as natural as possible, hence the dense planting, which lots of people would think looks messy. I find the very neutral silver sand colour fits in with this and I would rather be boiled in oil than have coloured gravel in my tanks. Then again, I also have black painted backs and sides of the tanks and I'd never have an "ornament", so there's nothing much to "match" colourwise, apart from plants and fish. The silver sand is pretty fine, but I never have to vacuum it, I assume that the many small snails, which many people seem to hate, get rid of the mulm and the resulting fertilisers are used up by the plants. Let nature do the work and fiddle about with the tanks as little as possible is my philosophy.

A bag of 'play sand' for kiddies' sand pits is also an option. Quite cheap I believe and bigger grains than silver sand. Pool filter sand is also used by some people.

It is fairly easy to remove sand using a siphon tube. Remove the wide rigid part then start the siphon using just the narrow flexible tube. Either use my method - hold the tube under the tap with both ends pointing upward, run water into it till the tube is full, carry it to the tank and with a thumb over each end, lower one into the tank and the other into the bucket. Or use the other method - one end in the tank and suck on the other end till the water starts to flow then put it into the bucket.
Whichever way you start the flow, use the end of the tube as a hoover to suck out all the sand. If you need more than one bucketful, I put both ends of the tube into the bucket, carry it away, lift both ends out and hold them together with the rest of the tube hanging down, empty the bucket then carry it all back to the tank and start again.

I find hoovering it out like this much easier than trying to scrape sand out of an empty tank. And you don't end up scratching the glass. It will be worth emptying all the water out and refilling to get rid of the hardness and high pH.


Don't forget to keep adding the small dose of ammonia to feed the bacteria till all this is sorted.

I got my sand from toys are us at £2.99 a pop for 15kg which was good as I needed 4 bags, that's was lime free and I've not had any issues with it.

Thanks Sue just seen your post that sounds a good way to do it. I may have to use play sand as the black sand I come across is quite expensive. I have sent a message to the sellers suggesting that they need to put on there ad that this sand raises PH. Hopefully others won't get caught out.