Geilee Soil - Active Buffering Soil for Caridina (Nền đệm acid tép lạnh)

No, and we will say so even though we sell it. Neocaridina thrive at pH 6.5–8.0 and need no acid buffer. Putting active soil in a Neocaridina tank means paying for a function you never use while pushing the water out of the range your shrimp actually want. Inert substrate — pool filter sand, quartz gravel — costs a fraction as much and does the job better. This soil is for Caridina: bee, crystal, Taiwan Bee, Pinto, Fancy Tiger.

NO — never rinse active soil. This is the great inversion of Caridina tank set-up, because every bag of inert sand and gravel demands a thorough rinse, so keepers do it by reflex. Rinsing active soil does two kinds of harm: the water strips the nutrients out of the granules, and the mechanical force shatters the fired clay, turning a buffering bed into mud that no longer buffers. Pour it straight from the tub into the dry tank, level it, then fill by pouring onto a plate so the stream never scours the bed. Cloudy water for the first few hours is normal; the filter will clear it.

The correct answer is not a number of weeks but a test result: ammonia 0, nitrite 0, and holding at 0 across several tests a few days apart. In practice: fresh soil leaches ammonia for roughly the first two to four weeks, a full nitrogen cycle takes 6–8 weeks, and after the cycle completes you should wait roughly another month for biofilm to develop — the thing shrimplets actually eat. The tank stays EMPTY throughout, not 'a few shrimp to test the water'. And if you want to test the tank, test it with cheap Neocaridina or snails, not with the Caridina you just paid for.

We do not print that claim on this page, and here is why. Two international dealers advertise exactly that. A third writes 'minimal to no ammonia leaching' and on the same page states a typical cycle time of 3–5 weeks. A soil that genuinely released no ammonia would not need a 3–5 week cycle — they contradict themselves. No independent test exists to settle it. If you believe the claim, add shrimp on day one, and the soil releases even 0.5 ppm, the colony is gone. That risk lands on you, not on the copywriter. Just test — an ammonia kit costs far less than a colony.

The figure the UK dealer publishes is roughly 1 litre of soil per 30 litres of water; the more reliable method is bed depth: 3–5 cm is the sweet spot, specifically 2.5–5 cm for a shrimp-only tank and 5–7.5 cm if planted, for root support. Quick conversions: a 20 L tank takes about 0.7 L of soil, a 30 L tank about 1 L, a 60 L tank about 2 L, a 90 L tank about 3 L. A deeper bed holds more exchange capacity and lasts longer, but too deep grows anaerobic pockets — do not exceed about 7 cm.

It cannot be recharged — when it is finished you replace it, and that is mandatory maintenance rather than an optional upgrade. Ion exchange is an account with a balance: once the granules stop swapping H⁺ for Ca²⁺ they are dead. Aim for 12–18 months on RO remineralised with GH+; soft tap water brings that down to roughly 8–12 months; hard tap water is shorter still. Frequent, large water changes also shorten life, because every change delivers a fresh load of Ca/Mg for the soil to strip. Spent soil still works as an inert base layer and a bacterial seed, but it has no value left as a buffer.

Not required to keep shrimp alive, but RO is an economic choice rather than a luxury one. Every degree of KH in your source water is soil capacity spent the moment the water goes in. Vietnamese municipal water is commonly hard and chlorinated — this is the number one reason a customer's soil 'fails early' and they conclude they bought a bad batch. An RO unit pays for itself in the tubs of soil you do not have to buy again, quite apart from giving you control of TDS and GH instead of leaving it to the water utility.

GH+ only, and NEVER GH/KH+. This is the classic Caridina killer. GH+ raises GH without touching KH, which is correct for Caridina. The GH/KH+ formulation (2:1) is recommended by its own maker for every shrimp EXCEPT Caridina — but the two bottles sit side by side on the shelf and look nearly identical. Every dose of carbonate is capacity the soil must strip out again: you pay for remineraliser, burn through the soil twice as fast, and block the very low pH you bought it to reach. The targets we run: GH 3–4, KH 0–1, TDS 100–120 ppm.

We publish 5.5–6.5 and state openly that this is the widest of the figures in circulation. Four Geilee dealers in the UK, US and Australia publish four different ranges: 5.5–6.5, 5.5–6.5, 5.2–5.8 and 5.4–5.8. There is no manufacturer datasheet to settle it. More important than the number: buffering is proportional to soil volume against water volume, so the figure you end up with depends on your source water, your bed depth and the age of the tank. Treat 5.5–6.5 as the band the soil pulls water toward, not as a guaranteed number.

Log pH and GH weekly — it is the only way to see the trend before it becomes an incident. There are six signs of exhaustion: pH drifting above 7.0 with GH above 5, breeding slowing then stopping, shrimplets dying at the moult, granules packing together like clay, plants losing vigour, and finally water changes no longer pulling pH down — which is the end. There is also a free check we use ourselves: measure TDS in your mixing bucket, then in the tank; working soil always pulls the in-tank number lower, and that gap is its remaining capacity. To be straight: we could not find this documented as a named standard test — it is our own rule of thumb.

We stock the LARGE grade, in the brand's full 8 litre resealable tub — which is also the right grade for the main body of the bed. On the millimetre figure, honestly: no manufacturer and no dealer anywhere publishes a number for Geilee soil. We looked; it does not exist. We will measure our own sample and update the real figure on this page. One note if you plan to layer with a powder grade: compacted powder buffers markedly worse, so keep it as a thin decorative cap that is also kinder to shrimplets, never as the bulk of the bed.

We do not print 'better than ADA' — some sellers say it, on the basis of under a year of their own use, and no independent comparison exists to lean on. What we can give you is price context: competing soils in Vietnam run roughly ₫69,000–180,000 per litre, for example Ista 9 L around ₫620,000, ADA Amazonia 2 around ₫840,000, Power House 8 L around ₫800,000, Benibachi 5 L around ₫845,000. And more important than any brand comparison: every decent acid-buffering soil works by the same ion-exchange mechanism, so how you run the tank — source water, remineraliser, water-change schedule — affects the outcome more than the label.