Chilled Kalkwasser (limewater)

[josephxsxn]

I was reading the article What Your Grandmother Never told you about lime and found this tidbit about fully saturated lime water it having a higher PH at a colder temperature. My current level of dosing would allow me to chill my solution before use to help improve tank PH; doing some research shows that we can take this to 5 c* (41f) and get 13.2 PH out of the solution.

Outside of PH changes does anything else happen to the saturated solution upon chilling such as loss of potency in other areas?

If the solution was chilled and rewarmed would anything occur?

Limewater that is saturated with calcium hydroxide has a pH of 12.54 at 25ºC. It is actually recognized as a secondary pH standard. The pH is substantially higher at lower temperature (12.627 at 20ºC and 13.00 at 10ºC)

https://www.lime.org/documents/lime_basics/lime-physical-chemical.pdf

 

[Daddy-o]

does it revert to original ph when added to a warm reef tank?

 

[josephxsxn]

does it revert to original ph when added to a warm reef tank?

Ah thats a good way to think about it perhaps.. If that was the case at 25 c* (77f) it would revert back to 12.45 PH (speculation as I am not a chemist.)

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

The pH is higher because more is dissolving at lower temperatures, so the alk and calcium added are higher. The effect on tank pH is the same per unit of alk and calcium added.