Clearly I've got a bit lazy with this build thread! I'll see about taking some more pics tonight of the tank, but I'll leave you with this update:
Last Black Friday (I buy most of my years supplies on BF!) I picked up a CO2 Scrubber from BRS, inspired by
bubbaque. If for some reason you haven't found his thread yet, you're missing out:
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/bubbas-sps-journey.353245/
Anyways, my reason for setting one up is that my pH was dropping significantly due to the house being all closed up. Yes we get a bit of rain here in Cali and it causes us to close the windows.
My pH that was running around 8.1 for most of the summer, but now was dropping down below 7.65 at night. I honestly believe it was not only slowing down my growth, but not making my acros happy. I thought about drilling a hole in the side of my house and running a line outside but I was too nervous about what might be in the air out there that I felt a scrubber was a safer option.
So I hooked up my scubber the same way bubba did. I ran a hose from my skimmer collection cup to the input of the scrubber, then the output line to the input of my skimmer silencer/airline.
If you decide to try this, a word of caution.
Check your Alk/Cal daily for at least the first couple weeks! I kid you not, my Alk/Cal consumption doubled and it took a couple weeks to level out and get stable again. My pH hits highs of 8.4 now and doesn't get below 8.1 at night. Here's a couple comparison charts for you from my Apex:
Pre-Scrubber:
Post-Scrubber:
So how did my tank respond? I'll sum it up with one of my difficult corals in particular. I had a nice chunky frag of Battlecorals Snipers Blue that started to encrust when I first got it, then sort of browned out and did nothing for months...and months. Since raising my pH, it colored up nicely and is not only encrusting, but noticeably growing. All of my acros have increased growth and I can notice growth in days now vs weeks/months before.
So I would guess your first question would be, how long does the media last? Good question and the one I was most concerned with before hooking it up. Since my last media change, I've been running about a month and I would say my media is about half used. If you have a bigger tank or are concerned with running out of media and having your pH drop, you can daisy chain two scrubbers together like bubba did.
