Understanding Water Hardness
Understanding water hardness and its units of measurement can help aquarists maintain optimal water conditions for their fish and plants.
Understanding water hardness and its units of measurement can help aquarists maintain optimal water conditions for their fish and plants.
When it comes to capturing a little bit of nature in our homes, we aquarium keepers have managed to pick the most difficult environment to reproduce. The difficulty arises from the numerous chemical parameters that must be controlled.
Ammonia is the primary waste byproduct of protein metabolism in fish and it rapidly attains toxic concentrations in the confines of an aquarium. It exists as a mixture of free ammonia (NH3) and ionized ammonia (NH4+) in equilibrium. This does not mean that they are present in equal proportion, but that they are converted from one to the other at an equal rate.