How to safely raise GH & KH - Sick Puffer

Oh no! Sick fish?! Come here and see if someone can help!
Forum rules
Read this before posting!!

Since this board has been up, we have found there are several questions that routinely get asked in order to help diagnose problems. If you can have that information to begin with in your post, we'll be able to help right away (if we can!) without having to wait for you to post the info we need.

1) Your water parameters - pH, Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrates and salinity (if appropriate). This is by far the most important information you can provide! Do not answer this with "Fine" "Perfect" "ok", that tells us nothing. We need hard numbers.

2) Tank size and a list of ALL inhabitants. Include algae eaters, plecos, everything. We need to know what you have and how big the tank is.

3) Feeding, water change schedule and a list of all products you are using or have added to the tank (examples: Cycle, Amquel, salt, etc)

4) What changes you've made in the tank in the last week or so. Sometimes its the little things that make all the difference.

5) How long the aquarium has been set up, and how did you cycle it? If you don't know what cycling is read this: Fishless Cycling Article and familiarize yourself with all the information. Yes. All of it.

We want to help, and providing this information will go a LONG way to getting a diagnosis and hopeful cure that much faster.

While you wait for assistance:
One of the easiest and best ways to help your fish feel better is clean water! If you are already on a regular water change schedule (50% weekly is recommended) a good step to making your fish more comfortable while waiting for diagnosis/suggestions is to do a large water change immediately. Feel free to repeat daily or as often as you can, clean water is always a good thing! Use of Amquel or Prime as a dechlor may help with any ammonia or nitrite issues, and is highly recommended.

Note - if you do not normally do large water changes, doing a sudden, large water change could shock your fish by suddenly changing their established water chemistry. Clean water is still your first goal, so in this case, do several smaller (10%) water changes over the next day or two before starting any large ones.
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Brondo
Puffer Fry
Posts: 13
Joined: Wed Apr 25, 2018 10:45 pm
My Puffers: 4.5 year 16ish “ Fahaka puffer
Location (country): USA

How to safely raise GH & KH - Sick Puffer

Post by Brondo »

My Fahaka is sick.
Has been for a week. Slime coat disease and now a couple of patches below his mouth are raw and red, almost fuzzy.
Treating with Kanaplex- day 3. Not much happening. Clamped gill. Not eating. Not good.

Doing a water test today. The ph is higher than normal. Its always been steady. Dark blue, darker than any of the low ph. Between 7.4-8. It looks like 8 to me. Its so hard to tell. But its usually about 7.

So I pulled out the gh & kh. Its crazy low. Kh 3, Gh 2/3!
Its normally 9/10

I am thinking that this must be the answer right? Maybe my water company did something a week ago and then I did my weekly waterchange and he started getting sick.

What do I do now? I have equalibrium and Alkaline buffer that I have used before on my snail breeding tank in the past. But never with fish. I dont want to shock him. But i tested the tap and its still bad. What I don’t get it alkaline buffer ups KH AND PH but the PH is higher than I want, but shouldnt the kh be higher then? How do i up the kh without upping the Ph?

How can I start helping this poor guy now?
Brondo
Puffer Fry
Posts: 13
Joined: Wed Apr 25, 2018 10:45 pm
My Puffers: 4.5 year 16ish “ Fahaka puffer
Location (country): USA

Re: How to safely raise GH & KH - Sick Puffer

Post by Brondo »

Good lord. Please, ignore me.
My kit is expired. I took a sample to
LFS to talk with them and it came out perfectly normaI am doing a medication treatment of Furan-2, kanaplex and general cure for his slime coat disease and to deal with any bacterial infection that is happening right now.
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