what is ph?

[Sushi]

I am hearing a lot about raising and lowering your ph. What does this mean and how does it affect the fish?

[Cody]

Originally Posted by Sushi

I am hearing a lot about raising and lowering your ph. What does this mean and how does it affect the fish?

pH measures the amount of acids in the water in your aquarium (I think).

You want to have a pH between 6.8 and 8.0. You can buy testing strips to check what it is.

[herefishy]

From wikipedia:

pH

pH is a measure of the acidity or alkalinity of a solution. Aqueous solutions at 25°C with a pH less than seven are considered acidic, while those with a pH greater than seven are considered basic (alkaline). When a pH level is 7.0, it is defined as 'neutral' at 25°C because at this pH the concentration of H3O+ equals the concentration of OH− in pure water. pH is formally dependent upon the activity of hydronium ions (H3O+),[1] but for very dilute solutions, the molarity of H3O+ may be used as a substitute with little loss of accuracy.[2] (H+ is often used as a synonym for H3O+.) Because pH is dependent on ionic activity, a property which cannot be measured easily or fully predicted theoretically, it is difficult to determine an accurate value for the pH of a solution. The pH reading of a solution is usually obtained by comparing unknown solutions to those of known pH, and there are several ways to do so.

The concept of pH was first introduced by Danish chemist S. P. L. Sørensen at the Carlsberg Laboratory[3] in 1909.