Potential PH imbalance? White substance on everything. Help plz

[ga712]

Hello,

I have a 12 gallon tank, (she) is about 1.5years old. I’d say compared to most people in the hobby I am still in a phase where I am learning, I don’t do anything crazy to my tank, I have some corals, urchin, a pair of clowns, and a leather toadstool. I don’t want to make my tank crazy colorful, something easy and simple works for me. My journey with this tank so far has been pretty chill. I haven’t had many problems, specifically problematic ones, all problems I’ve ever had were easy and just things that (from my understanding) happen to everyone, yet except this. Normally I am patient with this hobby, it’s what i like the most about it. I’ve recently (started abt 2 months ago) making my own saltwater with RO water. Since I got an RO/DI filter as a gift. An issue I’d always run into, is PH always being low. So, after a water change, I’d add buffer to the tank in small portions to bring it back up. This week for me was finals week in college so stress was high and I guess I wasn’t thinking right, I’ve been tired and focused on school so I thought cutting corners with PH would be a good idea (in retrospect it wasn’t, HUGE mistake) . When making my RO water, I added buffer. I make water in batches of 5 gallons per. I don’t remember how much buffer I added, I was in a rush, but i do remember it being a lot, since I thought that because I was making water in a big batch what much buffer would help (in retrospect this was also v v dumb). In an attempt to cut a corner, I messed up. As soon as I added my water this weird substance came around my tank. Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY closed, and hasn’t opened for 2 maybe 3 days now. I know its the PH bc normally this doesn’t happen, id only have to add some ph but not too much. Every time I’ve made saltwater everything has been fine. What else is leading me to think the PH is the problem is that all my other levels except for KH are normal. I have tried after this issue to make a 40% water change, while still monitoring nitrites to make sure I wouldn’t imbalance the tank further, and so far those have been okay. The ‘white stuff’ seemed like, the best way i can describe it is have you ever cooked bones in broth? And the skim comes at the top, same ‘looking’, except that it was stuck all over my filter, inside of it, around it and etc, same goes for my pump. I unfortunately forgot to take a photo of pre- cleaning it, but I have some photos from after I cleaned it, So far, my levels are as follows :

Ammonia - 0
Nitrate- 0
Nitrite- 0
Salt- 1.024
Ca - 400ppm
Mg - 1200ppm
PO - .004ppm
Ph - I’ll attach a photo of it bc atp im lost too man
KH - this was bad, I used 1.2Ml While using the Red Sea test kit. The full 1ml kept the color blue, it went green after i added .2 more ml
I have a filter and a skimmer in this tank.

I’ll attach photos of the tank’s white substance and the PH reader. But please help. I understand I made a mistake, I believe that mistakes can be okay as long as you learn from them and don’t make them occur again, this is doing major damage to my tank, and I don’t know what to do further.

Thank you for understanding and helping

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

Personally I would do a couple of water changes and then stop chasing ph. I haven't tested ph in about 5 years. And if you really want to chase ph, then you should upgrade the test kit, API is not accurate enough for our hobby and really just gives an indication, so I suggest to never make changes to a tank based on API tests. But even in the picture here, the ph looks about 8 which is perfectly fine.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

The alk additions pushed alkalinity too high and precipitated calcium carbonate.

Buffers are not a good way to boost pH as they do not do much for pH and are necessarily alkalinity additives.