Kitty Litter in Los Angeles: Properties of different brands

This page documents my experiments with various kitty litter brands in June 1997, when I was setting up a freshwater planted tank using a substrate of kitty litter with sand on top, a la Dan Quackenbush. It took me a while to find a couple of brands which worked for me without raising the tank's pH - Hopefully this info will save some work for other folks trying to do the same thing!

For pictures and descriptions of my two freshwater tanks, you can look at my aquaria page.

Read on for a description of how the results were obtained, or skip straight to the summary at the bottom of the page.

Experimental method:

(Very unscientific. <grin>)

1. Obtained reverse-osmosis water from the Glacier vending machines outside of Vons supermarket. Using the Aquarium Pharmaceuticals pH and hardness tests, the water is at pH 6.8, hardness 30ppm.
2. Poured RO water into small kitchen bowls which hold about 1.2 cups (~300mL) each. To make sure the bowls would not affect pH, I let one bowl with RO water sit overnight - pH did not change.
3. Poured a handful of each brand of kitty litter into the bowls. I stirred up the kitty litter a little after it was in the bowl - some brands clouded the water a lot, others only a little. I waited until most of the cloudiness settled (less than 1 hour) before testing the pH of the water in each bowl.
4. If the pH in the bowl hadn't changed very much at the time of this first measurement, I let the bowl sit overnight and measured again the next day.

Note: pH tests were made with Aquarium Pharmaceuticals pH test (range 6.0-7.6), and Wardley's High Range pH test (range 7.6-8.4).

Results:

* Note: I should probably clear up (oh, horrible pun) some confusion about the "Water Cloudiness" column in the above table. When I wrote "clouds a lot," I mean that the water turns into a thick slurry of clay particles about the consistency of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup. :-) By comparison, "clouds slightly" means that the mixture still feels like water, even though you can't see much through it. "Settles out in a few seconds" means that after a few seconds, the opaque part is gone and you can see through the water to the bottom layer of kitty litter in the bowl. Generally there will still be some fine particles floating around for an hour or so afterwards.

Summary

One interesting detail was the "mushiness," or tendency to cloud the water, of many of the kitty litter samples. Both Hartz and Lasting Pride consist of small grains about 1mm in diameter. They feel slightly mushy (i.e. not hard as rock) under water, but still remain separate grains, and don't cloud the water very much when disturbed. This is a great advantage when uprooting your plants! Most other brands immediately released clouds of very fine particles into the water which could take hours to settle. (After being in my tank for a while, the Hartz pH5 does cloud my water somewhat with fine particles, when I uproot plants. It's still nowhere near the cloudiness that the other brands caused.)

The pH5 doesn't actually affect the pH of my tank water very much. It's sealed off from the water column pretty well by a 1 inch layer of #16 silica sand.

Where to get it

I got Hartz pH5 at the Sav-on market on N. Lake Ave in Pasadena (or maybe Altadena - I'm not sure just where the boundary is). Lasting Pride can be found at Wal-Mart.

Distributor of Hartz pH5:
The Hartz Mountain Corporation
Harrison, NJ 07029
and
St. Thomas, Ontario N5P3W7, Canada

Distributor of Lasting Pride:
Oil-Dri Corporation of America
Chicago, IL 60611
800-643-3741

Feel free to email me with any comments or questions about this page. I'd be interested in knowing other folks' results with different brands of kitty litter, or the same brands in different parts of the world.

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boingy@ugcs.caltech.edu / 19 Apr 1998