Alk Swing by top up with clean water?

jcosta98 · Oct 23, 2020

Hi,

Just wanted to ask a quick question. I have a 10 Gallon that evaporates a lot of water daily. I keep topping up with full clean RODI 0 TDS water.

Can this topping up cause any KH swing or no? Should i buff the top off water with anything?

Thank you

Randy Holmes-Farley · Oct 23, 2020

Everything will swing down by the same percentage as you add water all at once.

How much evaporation, as a percentage of the system volume, do you replace on one shot?

A typical 1-3% daily is no concern.

jcosta98 · Oct 23, 2020

Thank you. The tank is actually 38L , but with Rock and stuff, probably around 30 or Less. I replace around 5L a week , so it is around 17% of water volume weekly , or more since I don't know the specific amount of space my rock and sand occupies.

I had to do some coral acclimation and removed something around 1L to do so and ended up filling it up with RODI water.

I noticed that a day later I had a drop of 1dKH, and it looked like my SPS didn't like that change (noticed a small bleach with lights out, imperceptible with lights on) ... In the meantime I already got the value back to normal.

Since this reef has such a low volume and sometimes I have to throw water out for coral acclimation , should I use some kind of buffer on it?