Dosing Alk Question

[Budman's Corals]

Wondering if its normal to be dosing 600ml of soda ash (brs kind) in a 400g sps tank
Does anyone else dose that much , ive been at 525 for the last week and every day to keep my levels at 175ppm i have to dose extra 125ml daily so i jumped up to 600 to see if this will help,

Just wanna see if others out there are dosing this crazy amount or is something up with my system

Thanks in advance

 

[laverda]

I dose about 50ml a day in my 29 gallon. I say about, as I am still trying to fine tune it since moving my tank. That would be almost 800ml a day for a tank your size.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Using the calculator below (and using entry for Randys Recipe #1), you can see that 600 mL per day in 400 gallons of water is only 2.1 dKH per day. That is by no means excessive.

Folks often add 1-4 dKH per day to typical reef tanks.

http://reef.diesyst.com/chemcalc/chem_calc3.html

 

[Budman's Corals]

Using the calculator below (and using entry for Randys Recipe #1), you can see that 600 mL per day in 400 gallons of water is only 2.1 dKH per day. That is by no means excessive.

Folks often add 1-4 dKH per day to typical reef tanks.

http://reef.diesyst.com/chemcalc/chem_calc3.html

Well i changed up to dose all day rather then night and i was holding fine at 175ppm every morning when i was dosing 400mls for the 12 hours. but now that im doing 24hour dose im up to 600ml to keep levels same. I know when i was dosing night alk level during day was dropping alot and it would replinish at night .but it seems wierd that i should be around the same number of mls im having to add but its not. im just curious if its better not to have that swing and stay with the 24hr dose?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

It is better, IMO, to smooth out the dosing as much as you can, even if that means it takes more.

I do not know if this impacted your results, but the higher the alkalinity, the higher the dose needed to keep it there because the demand depends on the alkalinity. It is also possible that more stable alk levels led to higher growth rates and higher demand.