My brainstorming idea on avoiding the kalkwasser evaporation limit.

[Dburr1014]

It seems the only obstacle is obtaining small scale equipment that is reliable and affordable to add the powder to rapidly stirred aquarium water. A tiny screw feeder might be the engineering solution for controlled powder dosing. Not sure how to deal with rat holing the kalkwasser powder. The point of mixing needs to be extremely turbulent. This might be accomplished with a small reactor consisting of a powerhead and baffles.

Did somebody say avast plank?

This would fit the bill. Screw fed, pump stirred.

The Plank

The Plank auto feeder represents years of our efforts to find and build a device that both serves the needs of our most delicate and selective aquarium inhabitants as well as our ability to realistically attend to their well-being. Many reef fish and most corals have evolved to continuously eat...

www.avastmarine.com

 

[Orito]

Who is making slurry a proprietary system?

Nobody yet, maybe I'm just ranting, it's Monday

 

[FishTruck]

I read about dosing Kalk slurries circa 2001 in a paper book - and did this manually each day back then… using cold ro water. Labor intensive but cheap and it works.

 

[vlad2spinn]

Friend of mine built a prototype that dosed kalk powder directly into his tank. He solved the issue of clumping, and precipitation. He was running this system for about a year before he took down his tank. I can not go into detail since he was considering applying for a patent, but idea is sound and it can work.

 

[GARRIGA]

Posted this idea a few weeks ago. Something I've been contemplating for years and tested for a few days but Kalk raised my alkalinity too high comparable to pH gains. Been considering an automated feeder that could dose powder to just making pills and dosing that with the feeder.

Dosing Powdered Kalk or other additives.

Crazy question. Were one to diy pills with kalk then dose them with auto pellet feeders because they want to increase the potency where evaporation limits that then would those pills allow co2 in and deplete its potency? Dosing would be in a high flow area where pills would dissolve and let...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[vahegan]

Vinegar and other acids would increase solubility however I found that despite Kaltwasser being highly basic that my tank water lost pH when trying to increase solubility with vinegar.

As a side note I think another con of kalkwasser is its lack of magnesium. Would love to have a product that had the magnesium already mixed in at a good ratio.

Thank you everyone for the kind responses!


All For Reef is the answer you are looking for! It has magnesium inside. The only difference is that it doesn’t have the pH boost and is a little more pricier.

If you add vinegar to kalk, you will end up in something similar to the calcium part of AFR. Because calcium hydroxide reacts with vinegar, making calcium acetate. Of course, it will loose the pH raising property, as the acid neutralizes the hydroxide. AFR uses formate rather than acetate, because it has less carbon. And this added carbon is just another disadvantage of using AFR: it acts similar to adding vodka to the tank, which is not always a good thing.

Nothing wrong with tried-and-true!

I’m a big fan of Randy’s 3 part system with NaOH as the alk additive.

Bingo. I have switched to dosing NaOH too and currently this works best for me.
Sodium hydroxide has high solubility: you can make a concentrated solution and add it drop-by-drop to high flow area. When the drops hit the water, magnesium hydroxide will precipitate, but then it dissolves quickly back in the flow.

This is a great alkalinity supplementation method, but you need to add calcium separately (as a concentrated CaCl2 solution on a separate doser channel - no issues here), and it will increase sodium ratio in the long run, therefore you need to compensate for magnesium and potassium as your part 3 (same as in the original Balling method - you can have this part 3 on the third doser channel, or manually add it once a week).

Thanks to replacing the sodium carbonate in my previous 3-part method with sodium hydroxide, and by dosing only at night, I have managed to achieve stable pH in around 8.6-8.7 range throughout the day. When I was dosing sodium carbonate, pH was going down to as low as 8.2, and I had much higher variability between day and night. I have still room for improvement in pH variability, by reducing the doses 10pm and 5am, and increasing from 5 to 9 (when my lights are on and pH increases naturally due to photosynthesis), but this is already a huge improvement over what I had before.



Note the sawtooth in pH values forming after each hydroxide dose. There is a pH 0.03-0.04 difference in each tooth. This is because GHL Profilux only allows me to have up to 24 individual doses each day (it is possible to overcome this limitation but not very straightforward). I am now building a DIY doser based on another thread in this forum, which allows for much more flexibility and adjustable uninterrupted dosing.

 

[Sisterlimonpot]

Note the sawtooth in pH values forming after each hydroxide dose. There is a pH 0.03-0.04 difference in each tooth. This is because GHL Profilux only allows me to have up to 24 individual doses each day

I don't think people realize the benefit to having controlled continuous dosing of additives vs scheduled dosing. I don't know if that diy pump has the precision to micro dose continuously. But if someone were to swap out the direct drive with a 5:1 (or even a 3;1) off the shelf stepper motor gear box, accurate continuous micro dosing can be achieved.

And if you have the proper skills you can redesign a case that would house the new motor.

 

[vahegan]

I don't think people realize the benefit to having controlled continuous dosing of additives vs scheduled dosing. I don't know if that diy pump has the precision to micro dose continuously. But if someone were to swap out the direct drive with a 5:1 (or even a 3;1) off the shelf stepper motor gear box, accurate continuous micro dosing can be achieved.

And if you have the proper skills you can redesign a case that would house the new motor.

Yes, I find that controlled continuous dosing is a great idea. GHL allows that mode, but considering the minimum speed of their dosing pumps, I would have to set up much larger dosing containers, and I don't have the room for that. Gearbox reduction may work, I have seen stepper motors with built-in gearboxex, and GHL uses standard stepper drivers (I have played with it, connected a Kamoer doser pump to the GHL circuit, and it works, just need to calibrate it. I did this test because I don't like GHL's pump heads: they use direct drive between the 2mm motor shaft and the rollers, which only turn due to friction between metal and plastic - I think this to a very bad design to use in pricey pumps, even though it is commonly used in cheap Chinese DC doser pumps).

Anyway, the DIY doser I have quoted is very good, allowing me to set variable pump speed at selected time periods (so that I don't have to dose during the day when pH is naturally high due to photosynthesis) and allows for ultra-slow speeds and very high dosing precision. I have already tested all the components and software, and all works great - I only need to build a box for it and set up a dosing program, but I could not find some spare time to do this yet. I love this open source project, it was designed by a fellow aquarist, it gives more flexibility than any commercial doser available, and the cost is very low.

 

[vahegan]

How do you ensure stability of the slurry potency?

There is a dosing method (don't remember the name) in which you do not try to control alkalinity but instead try to maintain a stable pH in the tank. Basically, you can dose kalk slurry or sodium hydroxide until you reach pH 8.65, and then stop dosing until it falls below this value. This method seems to work well, however there is a danger that if your pH probe goes bad, you may overdose and crash the tank (when using kalk, it will probably precipitate in the tank and the consequences will not be THAT bad), but this can be avoided by setting a maximum daily dosing limit (based on some margin above your historical daily dose) with an alarm in case your system gets close to this limit.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

There is a dosing method (don't remember the name) in which you do not try to control alkalinity but instead try to maintain a stable pH in the tank. Basically, you can dose kalk slurry or sodium hydroxide until you reach pH 8.65, and then stop dosing until it falls below this value. This method seems to work well, however there is a danger that if your pH probe goes bad, you may overdose and crash the tank (when using kalk, it will probably precipitate in the tank and the consequences will not be THAT bad), but this can be avoided by setting a maximum daily dosing limit (based on some margin above your historical daily dose) with an alarm in case your system gets close to this limit.

There is also the not infrequent outcome that in a tank that naturally has quite low pH, alk skyrockets before getting to your pH target. I never recommend that method without monitoring alk.

 

[GARRIGA]

There is also the not infrequent outcome that in a tank that naturally has quite low pH, alk skyrockets before getting to your pH target. I never recommend that method without monitoring alk.

Happened to me using Kalk chasing pH where 0.2 pH benefit resulted in 9 dkh going to 14 requiring acid to convert carbonate to co2 which was what I was trying to remove.

 

[vahegan]

There is also the not infrequent outcome that in a tank that naturally has quite low pH, alk skyrockets before getting to your pH target. I never recommend that method without monitoring alk.

True, therefore it is not a good idea to swap dosing methods blindly and abruptly.
What I did: I took the log of my pH variation during the day cycle, and tried to dose my same daily alkalinity dose in the NaOH form, but spread it out in such a way so as to oppose pH drop during the night hours. My pH curve is still far from perfect, but much better than before, and my corals seem to like the higher pH (it went up from about pH8.2 to pH8.6-8.7), and do not mind the KH variability during the day, as long as it stays in the range. This leads me to believe that the method of dosing kalk based on pH value may work, providing that you calibrate your probe every month and have a limit set to the maximum daily dose (based on your average daily alkalinity consumption plus a sensible margin). I believe that it is also mandatory to check the tank KH at least weekly, to be on the safe side.

 

[David Gaskins]

I have also been dosing saturated KALK from 28 gallon bucket since late 2022, and it works well. Also no decrease in MAG as other poster noted. Only issue I have noted is some increase in CA relative to ALK and MG, which I periodically adjust with incremental water changes.

Also, I've also stayed in a Holiday Express a few times as well!

Sincerely,

David