Jim Karanikas here again, at Tropical Fish World teaching about aquarium success. Now, let's talk a little about temperature and pH. A heater in aquarium is in the tank to maintain a stable temperature. It's not there really to either heat it up really high but just to maintain the temperature. So, a good temperature range for an aquarium is 75 degrees to 80 degrees. I would say in the summer time because your ambient temperature in house, is warmer, you actually want to keep your aquarium a little bit warmer. So, there is a little knob on top of the heater that's going to turn it up and actually maintain the temperature close to 78 or 80 degrees in summer.
During the winter when your house is usually cooler, we want to take the knob on the top and turn it down a little bit and drop the temperature down between 73 and 75. Now, make sure that when you do change the temperature of aquarium, you don't change it more than about two degrees a day, would be maximum. Fish can get sick of the chill down too quickly. Another important factor in the aquarium is pH. Most fish can live in a pH of around 6.5 to 7.5. Now, there are some fish, come from different parts of the world that have a much higher pH than that and we could talk about them later. But for the most part, most of the tropical fish are going to be around neutral which is 7.0.
Now, off the shelf you can purchase a pH adjustor. It's a powder that you can just put in the aquarium and it will maintain your pH right at 7.0. It's a very easy to use and it's great for beginners. However, when planes of aquarium, like this tank, you may not want to use this, because it has phosphates in it and phosphates would grow algae. In that case, you would want to use either product like this from Seachem that has an alkaline acid buffer. It's a phosphate free buffer. So, it's little bit more difficult to use and I would recommend it only if you had aquariums so well and I would consider you more of an expert.
Now, the thermometer in the aquarium could be placed either with the glass thermometer inside the aquarium like this or we can use a liquid crystal thermometer that we would place from the outside of the tank. Let's go ahead and do that. Basically just peel off the back it's just permanently in one spot. We just stick it on there and within a few minutes it will light up a greenish color to whatever temperature it is. This one right now is probably between 78 and 80 degrees which is perfect for these types of fish.
Alright, let's check the pH of the water. It's far a good idea to get a small test kit that has your pH, ammonia and nitrate. Those are the three basic things you want to check on a regular basis. I think, about once a month, if you check the pH, ammonia, nitrate and just monitor it and you will be in good shape. So, what we would do, is we take the vial. We put it in the aquarium. Fill it up to the line and then we are going to add three drops of the indicator in there and then we are going to cap it because we don't want to use our finger on here because our finger can make it more acidic than what it is. We shake this up and then we are going to put it against the color chart and see what the pH we have. So, anywhere from 7.5 down to 6.5 is okay. As you see our color right back here in the middle right 7.0. So we are absolutely perfect.
Hi, let's going to have some fun now. Lets go get some new fish and add it to the aquarium.
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