I thought I understood this, but when I look at the PH in my tank I realize I can't explain what I'm seeing. What I thought was going on was that the photosynthetic organisms in my tank (corals, algae, ...) were absorbing C02 during the light period, driving up the PH. And it would go down at night, outside the photosynthetic period. When I look at the PH swing in my tank, I do see a pretty consistent daily minimum at about 6AM, and a max at about 6PM. But this isn't very close to the timing the light period in my tank. My lights come on at 8:30 AM, have a 3 hour ramp up to the peak lighting, then stay at peak until 7:30PM, when they start a 2 hour ramp down.
So my PH hits the minimum and starts climbing 2.5 hours before the lights come on. Can anyone explain this? Is this normal?
I thought maybe it was due to C02 levels in the air in my house, but I have a C02 monitor and if I look at a graph of the readings from that, it's pretty consistent through the day, and fairly low - for the last 24 hours it hit a minimum of 433 and a max of 566ppm, and there isn't any kind of sine wave to the graph of that data.
So my PH hits the minimum and starts climbing 2.5 hours before the lights come on. Can anyone explain this? Is this normal?
I thought maybe it was due to C02 levels in the air in my house, but I have a C02 monitor and if I look at a graph of the readings from that, it's pretty consistent through the day, and fairly low - for the last 24 hours it hit a minimum of 433 and a max of 566ppm, and there isn't any kind of sine wave to the graph of that data.