MarsReefer
Valuable Member
I can't seem to get my kalk dosing to do what I think it should be doing. A bit of background:
I started dosing baking soda a while back but wanted to switch to kalk for pH benefits. My alk was fairly high at 9.9 when I stopped dosing baking soda. I wanted to see my consumption so I stopped all dosing for a few days and then remeasured my alk at 8.3. This was 5 days later. So that seemed to be a 1.6 drop over 5 days or 0.32 alk consumption per day.
Next I dosed some baking soda to get back up to 8.8 over 2 days and that worked as expected. Using the 0.32 daily consumption I used a reef calculator to calculate i'd need 1640 ml kalk per day to stay steady.
So I set my BRS 1.1ml dosing pump into my 5 gallon bucket of saturated kalk and set it to dose 20 minutes out of every hour, for a total of 480 minutes, or 528 ml kalk per day.
I expected this would be a little less than half the amount I needed so I should see alk drop over the next few days. However as you can see above my alk went up instead.
So where did I go wrong? My water changes happen over 2 hours daily at 7am via DOS so there was no change in water changes over this time period.
I started dosing baking soda a while back but wanted to switch to kalk for pH benefits. My alk was fairly high at 9.9 when I stopped dosing baking soda. I wanted to see my consumption so I stopped all dosing for a few days and then remeasured my alk at 8.3. This was 5 days later. So that seemed to be a 1.6 drop over 5 days or 0.32 alk consumption per day.
Next I dosed some baking soda to get back up to 8.8 over 2 days and that worked as expected. Using the 0.32 daily consumption I used a reef calculator to calculate i'd need 1640 ml kalk per day to stay steady.
So I set my BRS 1.1ml dosing pump into my 5 gallon bucket of saturated kalk and set it to dose 20 minutes out of every hour, for a total of 480 minutes, or 528 ml kalk per day.
I expected this would be a little less than half the amount I needed so I should see alk drop over the next few days. However as you can see above my alk went up instead.
So where did I go wrong? My water changes happen over 2 hours daily at 7am via DOS so there was no change in water changes over this time period.
