Can you keep sps with out dosing

[riche]

If I get back in which I know I will, I want to try my luck at some sps as they have grown on me from seeing others tanks

If running a mixed reef and adding sps can you do it with out dosing? Or is dosing 2 part the easy way to supplement what is needed?

 

[TheHarold]

You could do water changes to replenish what the corals use, but that would be frequent big changes

 

[29bonsaireef]

Depends on how often you want to do water changes, imo. I've had plenty of tanks with no dosing at all, but changing anywhere from 20-50% weekly

 

[Dburr1014]

Kalk is the easiest imo

 

[dantimdad]

Of course you can. Dosing only became really popular in that 10-15 years. People have been keeping SPS for 25+ with just 10-15% a week water changes.

Now, if you don't count Kalkwasser as dosing, then you can be even more successful with less water changes.

 

[riche]

Kalk is the easiest imo

and that can be run thro your top off correct? To make it easy and simple?

 

[Dburr1014]

Yes, mix, let settle, and don't use the slurry.

 

[Coastie Reefer]

it can be done, but is there any reason you are looking to not dose? It's not that bad you just have to test a little to figure out your consumption.

 

[Rick.45cal]

It depends all on your alkalinity consumption rate, there’s no way I could successfully keep up with the demand my system has for alkalinity with waterchanges. There’s also no way I could successfully manually dose what my tank consumes in a day. My system is now at a point that I’m having to move to a calcium reactor because my tank is consuming 1600ml of balling solutions a day, it’s getting expensive. My system is also constantly changing it’s own water, so there’s that too.

Here’s my opinion, there are a 10,000 different ways to do something. The trick is to find the one’s that are the simplest, easiest to maintain, and least expensive for the situation your tank is in that most importantly gives you the best result. If it isn’t easy, low maintanence you’re going to get tired of doing it, which is going to affect your long term success, let’s not lie to ourselves everything in this hobby is about the long term. SPS don’t like change, this includes even changing only 10% of your water in one shot every week. So changing lots of water in an SPS tank is risky in my opinion, plus expensive, time consuming, and hard work.

Some people love the work aspect of this hobby, I’ve long outgrown that. I’d rather spend all my time watching the fish and coral grow and let a tank/doser/calcium reactor do all the grunt work. All of those things add to “stabililty” in the system, you won’t be successful with SPS until you’ve created a routine that leads to less changes in the tank, eventually you find what the corals consider “stability” then they take off and reward you will growth and coloration. (Nothing wrong with kalk either, you just gotta use it right).

The tank is looking pretty righteous today so I’ll include a pic so you can see my results. happy reefing!

 

[riche]

it can be done, but is there any reason you are looking to not dose? It's not that bad you just have to test a little to figure out your consumption.

Trying to figure out what I want to do and I'm not afraid to try dosing but I'm a simple person and adding kalk to my top off might be the best bet

 

[Geebs19]

I agree with the above that it depends on the rate of consumption.

 

[CMO]

It depends all on your alkalinity consumption rate, there’s no way I could successfully keep up with the demand my system has for alkalinity with waterchanges. There’s also no way I could successfully manually dose what my tank consumes in a day. My system is now at a point that I’m having to move to a calcium reactor because my tank is consuming 1600ml of balling solutions a day, it’s getting expensive. My system is also constantly changing it’s own water, so there’s that too.

Here’s my opinion, there are a 10,000 different ways to do something. The trick is to find the one’s that are the simplest, easiest to maintain, and least expensive for the situation your tank is in that most importantly gives you the best result. If it isn’t easy, low maintanence you’re going to get tired of doing it, which is going to affect your long term success, let’s not lie to ourselves everything in this hobby is about the long term. SPS don’t like change, this includes even changing only 10% of your water in one shot every week. So changing lots of water in an SPS tank is risky in my opinion, plus expensive, time consuming, and hard work.

Some people love the work aspect of this hobby, I’ve long outgrown that. I’d rather spend all my time watching the fish and coral grow and let a tank/doser/calcium reactor do all the grunt work. All of those things add to “stabililty” in the system, you won’t be successful with SPS until you’ve created a routine that leads to less changes in the tank, eventually you find what the corals consider “stability” then they take off and reward you will growth and coloration. (Nothing wrong with kalk either, you just gotta use it right).

The tank is looking pretty righteous today so I’ll include a pic so you can see my results. happy reefing!

Agreed with this. If you are going to try and keep SPS without dosing it would probably have to be just a few SPS pieces in a larger non SPS dominant system. My SPS dominant system uses about 1.5 dkh per day with a target of 8. As you can see, just after a few days of not dosing regularly my SPS would be toast. Also, with the required dose so large on my tank, I could not manually dose say once per day as it needs to be spread over the course of the day in small increments to prevent precipitation.

 

[shred5]

It depends on how many you keep and size of your tank and other factors like how much coralline you have.
Sand, live rock etc can even buffer the water a little.
I have had to dose with just lps...
Sometimes just Coralline algae can drop alk and calcium down.
I have a 100 gallon tub right now in the basement and very few coral and I need to dose alk regularly.
A normal water change really does not do much...


I been manually dosing ESV B-ionic for probably 30 years on my smaller tanks.

 

[lolgranny]

You can do it with just kalk in the ato. That’s all I did on my 400g system and on my 40gallon. Kalk can keep up with it if you’re doing your water changes.

This is the 400gallon.

This is the drag tank I had with it

and this is the 40gallon.

On the 400g I did 40g changes a week and was running super saturated kalk in my ato. That’s all I did to it.

 

[stephj03]

I think you have to look at it as a progression. WC will work when you first get going and care about your first few SPS staying alive. If those live you’ll prob get more and need to put kalk in your ATO or do a little bit of 2 part dosing (this sounds like where you are right now).

If so, and you like the SPS you have, it’s likely that you’ll become interested in either upgrading to a larger tank or adding more frags. Usually around this point ppl start to care a little more about how fast they can get frags to grow or how well they can get them to color up. In the vast majority of cases this will lead you to dosing 2 part or getting a calcium reactor.

The outliers here would be if you start with either a very small or very large tank. In those instances the volume is small enough to supplement with WC if you’re ok doing them every day or two, or large enough that it will take years for SPS to use enough of the ALK/Ca floating in the water to make your test results fluctuate after 40-50g WCs.


I would suggest you think about which direction you see yourself going. If SPS is something you see more of in your future, start collecting the gear as you go so that you have the time to set it up and understand it before it’s critical to you tank stability.

If You’re not drawn to SPS, keep the ones you have, add calc and resist the temptation to track their growth rate or color pattern compared to others keeping the same corals within higher end systems.IMO

 

[Stigigemla]

I dose because my SPS need it. Without the dosing most of them will die.
Thats the reality for most of us.
One or 2 SPS can do good with waterchanges until they grow to big.
A few SPS can do good with kalkwasser.
But when they grow to big it will become impossible. Then The Corals need the dosing.
The Watervalues is deciding when You have to go to the next step.

 

[Hemmdog]

2 part is beyond easy.

 

[Stigigemla]

When You have monitored Your values for a year or 2 and dosed Your 2 or 3 part You will discover that its more work with the waterchanges. It is the beginning of testing and dosing when You feel uncertain thats the problem. As soon as it has become a habit and You are safe in what You are doing You can write here that it is only to begin just as I do now.

I have customers I practically had to force to read the manual and test the water in the shop to make them believe they can make the tests by their own. And now after 2 and 3 years they never ask me about dosing or values.