Dosing Kalk to Raise pH (new)

[Borat]

Hello fellor reefers from US&A. I am Borat, actually Dr Borat from Kazakistan. As we have billions of people living here - there is not enough oxygen and I have an ongoing PH issue with my tank (low PH of course!).

I have built a pressurised Kalk reactor that started dosing Kalk water today. Please share your views on the setup and how I can improve it!

Cheers,

Borat.

DIY Pressurised Kalk Reactor/Stirrer

Jagshemash! Warm greetings from the best country in the world (Kazakistan)! In this threead I am going to show you some more advanced Kazakistan technologies: Kalk reactor! To be very honest I have very little understanding of how a kalk reactor works, other than reading about it and hearing...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[Saltyreef]

I do sense some sarcasm but the oxygen content is the same no matter where you go. And have maybe dropped 1% in the last million years.

Its the carbon dioxide levels you should be concerned with. Just FYI

 

[Borat]

I do sense some sarcasm but the oxygen content is the same no matter where you go. And have maybe dropped 1% in the last million years.

Its the carbon dioxide levels you should be concerned with. Just FYI

Nice - please come to Kazakistan and I will give you the job the Minister of Chemistry and People Well-being!!!

 

[Saltyreef]

Nice - please come to Kazakistan and I will give you the job the Minister of Chemistry and People Well-being!!!

Very nice, I like!!!!!!! chenquieh neighbor!!!!!

 

[A Young Reefer]

Hello fellor reefers from US&A. I am Borat, actually Dr Borat from Kazakistan. As we have billions of people living here - there is not enough oxygen and I have an ongoing PH issue with my tank (low PH of course!).

I have built a pressurised Kalk reactor that started dosing Kalk water today. Please share your views on the setup and how I can improve it!

Cheers,

Borat.

DIY Pressurised Kalk Reactor/Stirrer

Jagshemash! Warm greetings from the best country in the world (Kazakistan)! In this threead I am going to show you some more advanced Kazakistan technologies: Kalk reactor! To be very honest I have very little understanding of how a kalk reactor works, other than reading about it and hearing...

www.reef2reef.com

Wait why does it say that you are from the uk. Hmmmmmmmm?

 

[Saltyreef]

I have built a pressurised Kalk reactor that started dosing Kalk water today. Please share your views on the setup and how I can improve it!

Cheers,

Borat.

DIY Pressurised Kalk Reactor/Stirrer

Jagshemash! Warm greetings from the best country in the world (Kazakistan)! In this threead I am going to show you some more advanced Kazakistan technologies: Kalk reactor! To be very honest I have very little understanding of how a kalk reactor works, other than reading about it and hearing...

www.reef2reef.com

........I will look on your treasures Gypsy....
Is this understood?......

 

[Borat]

Wait why does it say that you are from the uk. Hmmmmmmmm?

United Kazakistant = UK!

 

[A Young Reefer]

M

United Kazakistant = UK!

Makes sense

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Looking at the drawing, I'm not understanding how or why it is pressurized?

 

[Borat]

It's a good question, Randy.

The reason it's (generally) pressurised is as water is pumped out of Kalk reactor it's replaced by fresh RO water (and not air). In the absence of pressurisation, air gets drawn into Kalk reactor (as it's lighter and negative pressure would rather fill air, having lighter molecular weight as compared to water)..

 

[Borat]

I ensure it's well-pressurinsed by applying light layer of plumber silicone grease on sealant gasket...

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

OK, so the pressure is from the RO water gravity feed, and it can deliver faster than the peristaltic pump removes it from the reactor? OK, that makes sense.

 

[Borat]

OK, so the pressure is from the RO water gravity feed, and it can deliver faster than the peristaltic pump removes it from the reactor? OK, that makes sense.

Good observation! Existing gravity fed design ended up in a big disaster:
- using the same RO tubing to deliver RO water and Kalk ended up cloggimg up the float valve in the sump (even with super-tall reactor and a pre-mixing chamber)
- I added a dedicated (separate) tubing line for Kalk dosing, that's unrestricted (i.e. does not have a float valve)

Another disaster then occured:
- one day the peristaltic pump tubing got displaced (by wear through aging), so the pump stopped being an obstruction and Kalk water started to freely flow into tank (gravity fed). It dumped about 3% of tank volume over a few hours and my Alk jumped to 12 and my PH went to 9.4.. Luckily I measure Alkalinity every 3 hours and I receive email notifications about PH levels every 15 min - so I noticed that something was odd and discovered the problem quite quickly (within about 2 hours of it happening).

So I had to change the layout as follows:
- I added a pressure reducing RO water supply chamber just before the reactor (simple open top container with a float valve inside): now if the reactor de-pressurises (e.g. due to Peristaltic pump tubing displacement), it will not dump much of Kalk water to the tank (only some small amount)

 

[Borat]

The new diagram so far worked very well:
- I dose about 1% of tank water volume a day continously 24/7 (about 3ml/min)
- Kalk reactor has a relatively large amount of Kalk, about 2 tea cups and this amount seem to last for over 8 weeks
- the whole things works in the background, I don't have to do anything about it. I periodically monitor tank PH ( I receive PH notifications every 15 min) and if it starts to drop - I would know there are problems with the Kalk water supply
- if I turn off Kalk reactor my tank PH would naturally drop to 7.8, with the Kalk reactor is stays between 8.0 and 8.2 (depending on the time of the day), so quite a helpful PH boost!
- my Kalk reactor delivers about 50% of Alkalinity consumption, the rest is delivered by a calcium reactor. In the event of a calcium reactor failure (e.g. the pump stopps working) my tank would still receive partial Alkalinity supply, which is a good thing!!