JBL ProScape ShrimpsSoil Brown Aquarium Soil - 3L

JBL ProScape ShrimpsSoil Brown Aquarium Soil is an active soil for shrimp and aquascaping tanks that softens the water and holds it slightly acidic.

Key Features

• It changes your water on purpose: This is an active soil, not an inert sand. It pulls carbonate hardness down and holds the pH slightly acidic, which is precisely the water that Caridina shrimp, most tetras and soft water plants are looking for.
• The water Caridina shrimp need: Crystal red and the other bee shrimp will not breed in hard alkaline water. A soil that buffers soft and acidic is how most keepers get there without a reverse osmosis unit in the cupboard.
• Medium grain, so the bed breathes: A medium granule keeps water and oxygen moving through the bed, which is what prevents the dead anaerobic patches that a fine, packed sand develops.
• Minerals for plants, but not a plant food: JBL describe it both as a soil without added nutrients and as supplying minerals. Read it as a mineral soil that conditions the water and supports roots, and plan to dose a fertiliser for the plants rather than relying on the bed to feed them.

Read This Before You Buy It

• It is the wrong substrate for hard water fish. Malawi and Tanganyika cichlids, livebearers, most rainbowfish and anything marine need hardness and alkalinity, and this soil works against all of them.
• A new soil leaches ammonia for its first weeks. Cycle the tank on the soil with nothing living in it, test until ammonia and nitrite both read zero, and only then add shrimp. Shrimp are far less tolerant of ammonia than fish are, and this is the most common way a first shrimp tank is lost.
• Test your water before and after. Check KH, pH and TDS on your tap water, then again a week after the tank is filled, so you know what the bed is actually doing instead of assuming.
• An active soil does not last forever. Its buffering capacity is used up over time, commonly somewhere between a year and eighteen months, after which the bed is effectively inert and the water drifts back towards your tap values. Plan on replacing it eventually.

Setting It Up And Keeping It

• Do not rinse it and do not stir it. The granules are soft, and washing or digging turns them to mud and destroys the buffering you paid for.
• Fill the tank slowly onto a plate or a bag so the water does not punch a crater through the bed.
• Plant into it gently with pincers rather than pushing roots in with fingers, which compacts it.
• Do not drive a gravel vacuum into it. Hover the siphon above the surface and lift waste off the top.
• Keep heavy hardscape off it where you can. A large rock settling into a soft soil crushes the granules underneath it.

Good To Know

• Sold in 3 litre and 9 litre bags. Work out what you need before ordering: length times width times depth in centimetres, divided by a thousand, gives litres.
• Soft acidic water holds less buffering, so pH can move faster than you expect. Keep an eye on it in the first month rather than assuming it has settled.
• If you want soft water for shrimp but a substrate you can dig and rescape freely, an inert sand plus a remineralised RO water routine is the alternative. Ask us and we will talk it through.