Should I dose kalkwasser???

[Raysup88]

Ok so I’ve got a young 25gallon cube tank about 6 months set up and just added a bunch of frags from Orlando Reefapalooza. 3 of which would consume the kalkwasser. I do 10-20% water changes weekly with Red Sea purple bucket pro salt I believe. I just purchased reef energy ab+ and once a week I do reef roids. I have the kalkwasser and was trying to dose small drops throughout the day with a jug and line with a stopper but either in the sump the slurry kinda sits on top the water above the return pump or now I’ve tried to drip above the tank and it calcifies on the glass and I rub it and the dried up calcium goes all over the the tank swirling around like sand lol so if I continue to do kalkwasser any ideas to make it easier? Or just skip it until more corals/bigger tank comes in lol

 

[Osc556]

You’re probably good with your weekly water changes for a little while. I would test to find out what your tank is using up and how quickly. Determine the need before you blindly add anything

 

[aSaltyKlown]

Is there a need for it? Right now I would wait and see if you actually need to dose anything. You need to test and find out if weekly water changes are able to keep up with consumption. No need to dose if it is not needed.

 

[bushdoc]

As two reefers above stated, check your consumption first. It is very likely that water changes would be enough.

 

[LordofCinder]

You might consider to stop dosing until you have better understanding of what dosing will accomplish. It sounds like you are dosing “just because “, but probably no need for a young small tank

 

[nereefpat]

To be clear, dose kalk to replace alkalinity and Ca. You need to measure alk consumption

 

[Raysup88]

Ok everyone absolutely correct on getting readings first. I assumed that since the corals I was buying assumed they were already getting dosed with something so I wanted transition effortlessly. But these are todays readings

 

[nereefpat]

Nice. Now don't dose anything for a few days, then check alkalinity and Ca again. Then calculate alkalinity consumption per day.

 

[o2manyfish]

To keep things simple let just look at your Alkalinity at 9.5.

People dose to maintain an Alk of 9.5 in their water. As the corals happily absorb the light during the daylight hours they do their thing growing and building a calcium based skeleton. And that hard skeleton comes from pulling the calcium and alkalinity out of the water column.

When you take your water sample your grabbing a random sample of 10ml of water and testing it to find out your Alk is 9.5.

So all the water in your tank/system is 9.5 alk - all 25 gallons.

Now the corals as they grow are pulling from that 25g volume. Look at the size of your tank and size of your 3 frags and then realize that the coral is only growing, in your case encrusting most likely, around the base of the coral for the most part and realize how much alkalinity it was to pull out to make that 25gallons of water drop from 9.5 to 9.45.

Dosing is to maintain that 9.5 as stable as possible.

With your weekly water changes, and 3 frags I doubt you well see the alkalinity drop outside the margin of error for the accuracy of your testing method. You just don't have enough consumption, yet.

Two summers ago when my 1350g system was packed, during the daylight hours the system was dropping .5dkh per hour - This was determined by having an Alktatronic test every hour 24x a day.

With that kind of data you could see the Alk start to drop as the sun comes up in the morning. You could also watch the pH rise as the sun gets stronger throughout the day.

We run both a Giant Dastaco Calcium Rx for dosing and a Kalkwasser Rx. All of our top off is Kalkwasser, which on a hot summer day when Alk is dropping .5 dkh per hour (that's while the Calcium Rx is cranking too) we replace up to 75g a day in Kalkwasser.

During the night the Alkalinity consumption drops off so much that we have to shut the Calicum Rx off during the wee hours.

We had literrally 100's of lbs worth of coral colonies that was consuming this much alk. With just 3 small frags your amount of biomass of coral consuming alkalinity is not enough to drop the alk if you are doing your regular water changes.

You have a while to go before you need to worry about keeping up with dosing.

Dave B

 

[Raysup88]

Thanks everyone

 

[Raysup88]

Yeah I’ve got 5 zoa frags some Forrest fire mushrooms then I have monti digi Duncan and a hammer

 

[Raysup88]

Also PH is 8.5 I believe that’s a good number as well correct?

 

[Rmckoy]

Yeah I’ve got 5 zoa frags some Forrest fire mushrooms then I have monti digi Duncan and a hammer

The zoas or mushrooms will consume very little Alk or cal if any at all .

I wouldn’t dose anything until you know for sure how much your system is consuming . Using a reef calculator for the desired product you can calculate the amount that needs to be dosed per day ( which can be divided to make smaller more frequent doses

Rule #1 of reefing

never dose anything blindly without knowing what the effects of the product being dosed

 

[Raysup88]

Ok so this is a week later and everything looks good besides alk last week it was at 9.5 and week later 8.3.