Strange Mystery with GH vs KH and Salty Shrimp

[tinyplants]

Okay, let me preface this by saying that I know I made a HUGE mistake in the past couple days.  I messed up.  My shrimp suffered.  I regret everything.  But it brought me to a mystery.  So please forgive me my idiotic mistake and focus on the mystery.  

I have a tank of cherry neos.  It's a 10 gallon with a marineland filter with a sponge on the intake.  It is moderately planted.  It has Tahitian moon sand as the substrate.  I have a nice chunk of driftwood sold to me by a highly rated LFS, though I don't actually know the species on the wood.  No other inhabitants, just a handful of cherry neos (I lost so many in the move and then my AC broke and the tank got warm and I lost a whole bunch more--the remaining shrimps are supershrimps, I swear).

I was siphoning into my waste bucket (which is used for all waste water, not just shrimp waste water) when my cat, who has been very sick, made a weird noise.  I ran to him to make sure he was okay--he was, he's just a jerk--and I forgot to break the siphon.  I lost enough water that I needed to add a lot to make my filter work properly.  Luckily, I had enough RO water to make it happen.  Unhappily, in all the confusion and stress of the sick cat in the past couple weeks, I must have double dosed with Salty Shrimp GH/KH in my RO water.  Which I didn't realize until I had put in a bunch of water and was double checking my params after such a huge water change and realized that my GH had skyrocketed to dGH 12.  At that point I didn't even think to check my KH because I went into damage control mode on my poor shrimps trying to do anything I could to save them from the abrupt change in dGH.  I usually keep them at around dGH 8.  I have to admit, I've forgotten what the KH usually is because, in the madness of moving and renovating the new house and not having a kitchen, currently, I haven't been keeping good track of tank params.  Terrible shrimp owner, I know.  I've just sort of given the params a glancing check and gone 'yup, within normal' and haven't even bothered checking KH in awhile.

I am now doing very small partial water changes (about an inch of tank water or less) often to gradually bring the GH down and am resolving to do better by my shrimps now that I'm moved and have more time and energy.  I've been checking the params often and I'm trying to understand a thing.

I am using Salty Shrimp GH/KH.  My GH is currently 10.  My KH, on the other hand, is currently 2.  This seems very strange.  I've tested and retested, though I haven't gone out to buy a new test kit yet--I'll be doing that tonight.  It's definitely 10 GH and 2 KH with the Hagen kit.  My pH, the only param that should matter for altering KH, I would think, is solidly at a 7.6 with three different API test kits from three different batches.  I don't know why my KH is so low compared to my GH when I double dosed with a GH/KH booster.  I'm continuing to monitor it and will update if anything changes.  Does anyone have any ideas what it could be?

[Brolly33]

I took out too much water on one of my water changes due to a catlike distraction. I just put it back into the tank.

If your pH is stable at 7.6, I would not mess with the KH of 2. Let the tank sit stable for a week and go back to your regular water change cycle. KH is effectively a buffer to pH, so your event may have pushed pH far enough to have lowered your KH to a new equilibrium point.

Easy test. Make a new batch of RO and remineralize as normal. Test KH.




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[tinyplants]

My bucket was... not in a condition where the water could be reapplied to an aquarium.  I'll be doing a batch of RO tomorrow and testing.  I was talking to a man at the LFS who suggested that my plants might be using up some carbonate?