Dosing kalk

[BPreefer]

Pm sent

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[SAZAMA]

I test everyday in order to keep thing somewhat stable, and I never dose a tank that has not been tested. my last crash was when I left for three days and came back to my wife saying she put all three days in one shot because she forgot (a 4. dkh swing in five min.) my lps dont seem to care but some of my sps melted away. my new goal is to triple my water volume to somehow correct any swings that may happen. IMO alk is the hardest thing to maintain in any sps dominated tank and what will truly separate the pros from the joes. All I know is the better my water chemistry, the better the corals can perform for color and growth. (everyones goal)

 

[BPreefer]

I dose all BRS stuff,alk all night to keep the ph stable. but you need a dosing pump and a controller

When you say you use a controller,are using it just as a timer for the dosing pump? Or are you controlling the pump by monitoring the ph?

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[DyM]

I dose RHF's DIY as well - but I don't put it into water, but rather add it dry to my tank every day. For my system, a heaping tea spoon of excel snow melt, and heaping tea spoon of baked baking soda in by the skimmer every day does the trick. I've dosed Kalk a few times - to get alk up, from a 2 liter tuperware jug with a drip line coming out about an inch up from the bottom. Even after letting the solution settle for a day, the line clogs or has build up over a few doses. Never tried the dosing pump route but would think for the price, they wouldn't clog easily.

 

[miwoodar]

IMO alk is the hardest thing to maintain in any sps dominated tank and what will truly separate the pros from the joes.

I'll pile on here. You're absolutely right about the importance of alkalinity maintenance. I think it's easy to maintain though if you invest a little bit of time into designing an approach and sticking to it. It's also easy to let alk slip through the cracks because our attention often gets pulled towards other, much less important, topics.

This is similar to the timer that I'm using for two part. Home Depot used to carry them and still might. It includes two outlets and can be set to run an exact number of minutes. I wish each outlet could be controlled indenpendently but it's a minor gripe. (edit to add: I just browsed the reviews on Amazon and it looks like a lot of folks have a hard time reading directions. This timer is certainly more complicated than a regular mechanical dial timer but it's still pretty easy to use once understood. The initial setup took maybe 10 minutes but tweaking the duration takes only 30 seconds. The additional accuracy is worth the setup trouble for a dosing application.)
http://www.amazon.com/Intermatic-DT620-Heavy-Indoor-Digital/dp/B004TGO6RY

 

[miwoodar]

I have noticed that dosing 1/8 teaspoon per gal for all top off is not even keeping up with the demand of my 28 nan cube and i only have a couple small sps. Im going to bump to 1/4 tsp per gal and see what that does. I gotta say though even with just 1/8 tsp per gal I have noticed a nice rise in ph.

As a reference point, 2-2.5 gallons/day of saturated limewater (2 teaspoons/gallon) was barely keeping up with my tank full of nubs. That's with a small desk fan in the sump and two computer fans in the hood to keep the evap up.

 

[SAZAMA]

I use a Reef Keeper Lite to periodically dose alk. at night over an twelve hour period, this will not only replace the needed alk. it will also maintain proper ph levels at night. the most you should ever raise in one shot in my opinion is 1 DKH.
[video=youtube;mI52IyBtjp0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI52IyBtjp0&feature=player_embedded#![/video]

 

[SAZAMA]

[video=youtube;w-kt513NoII]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-kt513NoII[/video]

 

[miwoodar]

I like the way you think.

I can't wait to get a controller someday. My recent vacation had me out of the house for 15 days and the tank was left in the care of a completely non-aquatic neighbor. Fortunately everything turned out fine but I would have loved to have had remote monitoring capabilities.

 

[Walter White]

As a reference point, 2-2.5 gallons/day of saturated limewater (2 teaspoons/gallon) was barely keeping up with my tank full of nubs. That's with a small desk fan in the sump and two computer fans in the hood to keep the evap up.

Good to know. I forgot I actually do have a chalice the size of a softball in there too. It went in recently and is doing really well. I bet that's where allot of my calcium deficiency is coming from.
Ill just keep slowly increasing the dosage until I hit equilibrium.

Thanks MW

 

[SAZAMA]

a rkl is only 100$

 

[DyM]

I'm going with a full Apex controler here shortly, can't wait to tie everything together. Every time I go away for more than a day, I have this nagging fear of what I might come home to. The remote monitoring and email allerts are worth the investment. With that said I may do the BRS dosing pumps at some point... anything that can be automated with conditions to catch the drifting (controler) is a good thing in my book.

 

[BPreefer]

Thanks for all of your input and ideas. I think I will be going back to dosing 2 part. Now i just need to get some dosing pumps, maybe after xmas. I have a RKL on my nano, but was thinking of looking at the apex jr. for my 75. Any thoughts, likes ,dislike? I don't want to derail my own thread, just curious

 

[miwoodar]

I test everyday...

NFW, really? I've been testing everyday recently to dial in my new two-part dosing system but my goal is to get it to the point that I only need to test once per month to confirm that everything is still on track.

Thanks for the tip on the RK Lite...if my LED doesn't put me in the doghouse, perhaps that will. I play a continual balancing act between my hobbies and my fun-money budget. I've learned that the trick is to convince the wife that she has made the decision, not me. Once that is done, the budget is no longer 'mine' and we can start pulling from the home budget, the gifts budget, and the misc budget...whatever has reserve at the time.

 

[SAZAMA]

alk and cal is tested everyday, I'm not gonna lose any more corals I'm way over that.

 

[djkms]

For the longest time I just used a CA reactor with a rio pump feeding the water through it. I had a plastic thing pinching the line to control the drip rate. Honestly this setup sucked. My PH would go from 7.8-8.3 throughout the day. Not terrible but that's a pretty big swing IMO. Also, after a while the pinched line would get clogged and if I didn't watch it daily then my levels would drop fast. Of course I just had to overcompensate to fix it and lost some sweet corals doing so with the spike.

Now I have a kalk stirrer which is hooked up inline with my Tunze Osmolator (ATO) to help control ph. The stirrer comes on for 2 minutes at a time twice a day:
Fallback OFF
Set OFF
If Time 10:05 to 10:07 Then ON
If Time 22:05 to 22:07 Then ON
If pH > 08.30 Then OFF

To avoid PH spikes and to help keep it as stable as possible my ATO only comes on for a minute at a time at various times throughout the day:
Fallback OFF
Set OFF
If Time 00:00 to 00:01 Then ON
If Time 02:00 to 02:01 Then ON
If Time 06:00 to 06:01 Then ON
If Time 10:00 to 10:01 Then ON
If Time 12:00 to 12:01 Then ON
If Time 16:00 to 16:01 Then ON
If Time 20:00 to 20:01 Then ON
If Time 22:00 to 22:01 Then ON
If pH > 08.30 Then OFF
If FeedC 000 Then OFF

Back to the calcium reactor; I dont run the rio pump anymore. I actually hooked up my litermeter 3 to the reactor and let me tell you, best move I have made with my setup so far. No more stupid clogged pinched lines, no more over compensating and with my hanna checker my alk is stable to 2ppm on a daily basis! I dose 11 liters of CA effluent into my system daily and my regulator is set as follows:
Fallback ON
If pH2 > 06.50 Then ON
If pH2 < 06.30 Then OFF
If pH < 08.00 Then OFF

The litermeter is also set for failsafes encase my regulator gets stuck on it won't feed effluent into the system.
Fallback ON
Set ON
If pH < 08.00 Then OFF
If pH2 < 06.20 Then OFF
If Outlet SumpFloat = ON Then OFF

Things have been pretty smooth sailing since using kalk and putting a peristaltic pump on my CA Reactor.

 

[Cake_Boss]

I mix it into fresh water and dump it in, corals love it, gotta be carefull the first few times till you know what your system can take, but I dump like 3+ gallons of milk into the tank every couple days. (100 gallon system)

The wicked system, you should patent it. It works like nothing else.

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