# TNC GH Boost



## arron nolan (16 Feb 2013)

Iv recently bought TNC GH Boost for my african cichlid tank (not yet set up) whats the best way to use it and how to use when doing water changes? Any help would be appreciated.


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## ceg4048 (17 Feb 2013)

Hello,
	   It's not clear at all from your question what your intent is. Do you intend to use this for a planted tank, or for your African Chiclid tank? Or is it that you intend to combine the two to have a planted African Chichlid tank?

According to the TNC website, this product, when dosed in 140L of water will raise the GH by 1 degree. TNC do not specify how much Mg and how much Ca the concentration that teaspoon provides, so this is still a bit of a mystery.

In any case, as far as plants are concerned, this is not really a big deal. If you are using tap water, then you should download the water report from your municipality to see if you should even bother using this product in the first place, as you may already have enough Ca and Mg in the tap. If you are remineralizing from RO or distilled water then add enough to raise the GH to about 3 or 4 degrees.

I don't know what hardness value African Chichlid keepers typically use so someone else might be able to advise.

Cheers,


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## arron nolan (17 Feb 2013)

Hi, thankyou for the reply, sorry i didnt make it clearer what my intentions are, i intend to make my african cichlid tank planted, iv had some experience with growing plants before and found my water has some mg n cn and is around the ph 7.2, african cichlid require around 8 so my intention is to boost my plant growth aswel as raising my ph.


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## ceg4048 (17 Feb 2013)

OK, thanks for the clarification. If you already have a GH of 8 then there is no need to add this product unless you can confirm that the 8 degrees of GH is due to an unreasonable imbalance in the amount of one versus the other.

If you want to boost your plant growth, then adding this product will return the _lowest_ yield of performance. These metals are considered micronutrients. The prefix "micro" tells you pretty much what sort of performance increase you will get if you already have plenty of Ca and Mg in the water. If you want to improve growth efficiently, then you need to increase the concentration level of the most important and the most consumed elements; Carbon, Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium (C & NPK). This will produce the highest yield.

As far as manipulating the pH I'm very certain that you should avoid trying to manipulate the tank pH. neither the fish nor the plants will really need to maintain a rigid pH number. I would advise the let the pH fall where it may when adding CO2 and leaving it be. If you still wanted to adjust your pH tern a better way to accomplish that would be with the addition of a carbonate or bicarbonate source which would buffer the water more effectively than Ca or Mg. Anyway, as I mentioned, I would suggest to abandon plans to manipulate pH in a CO2 injected planted tank.

Cheers,


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## Ed Seeley (17 Feb 2013)

arron nolan said:


> Hi, thankyou for the reply, sorry i didnt make it clearer what my intentions are, i intend to make my african cichlid tank planted, iv had some experience with growing plants before and found my water has some mg n cn and is around the ph 7.2, african cichlid require around 8 so my intention is to boost my plant growth aswel as raising my ph.


 
Unless you're keeping sensitive wild Tanganyikans then any pH above 7 will be ok.  The easiest way to raise it is to add aragonite into your filter somewhere which will slowly dissolve and raise the KH and GH.  BYW GH doesn't effect pH it's KH that does.  You can raise this using bicarb.


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