My aquarium's pH level keeps rising?

Question

I have a 38 gallon aquarium. About once a month I change the water, doing it just like I'm supposed to- filtering the gravel, leaving 3/4 of old water, putting in chemicals at the right measurement. But my fish keep dying. When I take my water to be tested the first time a pH level was off the chart, and the next time it was high but a lot closer to normal. I got new fish, bigger than the ones I had before, and they're still dying. Do i just have to keep putting a pH balancer in there? What causes it to keep going up? Is that whats killing my fish?

Answer 1

pH is probably the reason for why your fish are dying. But have you cycled your tank before? Not cycling your tank can raise your pH. It might also be the water you change your fish with. Some tap water has more pH than others.

Answer 2

What type of grvel do you have in the bottom? If it's shell or cchiclid gravel it will kepp your PH high. If you have any shells they will also. Lava rock raises PH. Some water is treated by the city and might have High PH. PH will kill the fish, but you could beat this a different way and the PH needs to be high for types , like Chiclids, african or south american. Hope this helps.Oh if you decide to go with those fish you could have the shells or different gravel

Answer 3

For commercially raised freshwater species, the quest to maintain proper pH tends to do more harm to the fish than the fish simply adjusting to a higher or lower pH than is normal for their original environment. Fish can readily adapt to change but it has to be gradual change. Unfortunately, most chemicals sold for adjustment of pH do so rather quickly, which more often than not causes more problems than it solves.

As for the tank, we know you pH tested high but what about the other chemistry readings. Are ammonia and nitrite levels in the acceptable range? One final note to remember, not all test kits are created equal. A test of water with 5 different kits will likely yield five different results.  Good test kits can be found but they can be a bit on the expensive side. I would add that it's money well spent however.