Dosing help! Swapping from ATI Essentials to ESV Bionic plus mag.

[rockskimmerflow]

You know I appreciate your input but it’s hard for me to take your comment serious when you assume I’m dosing the system completely wrong and to much.. and that my system at most should require 5-10ml max.. and yet you know nothing about my tank size.. my coral selection or even really how long I have been using ati’s system

Here is a pic of my tank today
Just looked it up and been running ati since last September
My alkalinity has stable since that point for the most part the dips are when alkalinity has to be increased and adjusted

Thx for the better pic of the tank. 10mL is still plenty IMO if you were to up the flow in the return chamber. If you're still not dosing them equally the trace imbalance is likely why you haven't seen the colors or growth you'd wanted. Your corals look good so your levels are not too out of whack luckily. The good news with correcting a simple mistake like lack of turbulence at point of dosing is that if you start at 10mL on each channel your corals will begin blowing up once the trace levels come in line. Then you will absolutely need to up the dose across all channels equally in short order and you'll be off to the races. I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but the system is designed to work well with equal doses. But what do I know, maybe your tank is that one special, magic confluence of factors and ATI - E just will never work with an equal dose. In any case, if you don't want to take advice from someone who's corrected dosing issues in probably 50+ of customer tanks (often dosing systems set up by other professional services) then that is of course your prerogative. I wish you all the best with your systems. You've got a nice setup and I'm sure you'll see success, just trying to help you understand that ATI does not of it's own accord spike Mg and CA levels when dosed equally. That can literally only happen from overdosing with the inherent precipitation of the solution that's closest to it's saturation point in seawater (the alk), so that's why I recommended a lower baseline dose to allow the system to correct.


Btw, what are those white crumbles of stuff in the return chamber under the dosing lines next to the pump in the picture???

 

[UABsleeper]

Thx for the better pic of the tank. 10mL is still plenty IMO if you were to up the flow in the return chamber. If you're still not dosing them equally the trace imbalance is likely why you haven't seen the colors or growth you'd wanted. Your corals look good so your levels are not too out of whack luckily. The good news with correcting a simple mistake like lack of turbulence at point of dosing is that if you start at 10mL on each channel your corals will begin blowing up once the trace levels come in line. Then you will absolutely need to up the dose across all channels equally in short order and you'll be off to the races. I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but the system is designed to work well with equal doses. But what do I know, maybe your tank is that one special, magic confluence of factors and ATI - E just will never work with an equal dose. In any case, if you don't want to take advice from someone who's corrected dosing issues in probably 50+ of customer tanks (often dosing systems set up by other professional services) then that is of course your prerogative. I wish you all the best with your systems. You've got a nice setup and I'm sure you'll see success, just trying to help you understand that ATI does not of it's own accord spike Mg and CA levels when dosed equally. That can literally only happen from overdosing with the inherent precipitation of the solution that's closest to it's saturation point in seawater (the alk), so that's why I recommended a lower baseline dose to allow the system to correct.


Btw, what are those white crumbles of stuff in the return chamber under the dosing lines next to the pump in the picture???

This comment makes a little more sense and I understand where your coming from now with dropping it back off for a short period to let trace elements come in line.. and I agree that the alkalinity is a bit high for this dosing system and I actually cut it back by a couple ml ~ two weeks ago to let it drift down to the 8.5-9 range.. don’t really want to go any lower than that because the current salt mix I use mixes to an alkalinity of ~9 dkh @ 35ppt and want to keep swings with water changes to a minimum..

However please not that current dosing of the three components Are all very close to each other at the current moment with only mg being dosed less by a couple ml .. this large discrepancy with ca and mg being way to high was when I first started dosing ati.. the tank was only a couple months old at that point and I presume that was the issue.. the corals were not really using the elements in typical amounts like a mature “ideal” system should!

The white crusty stuff your referring to is some detritus.. currently ca&hco3 are dosed >1hr Appart and I agree wouldn’t hurt to add a little turburlance to the sump return chamber if it doesn’t introduce microbubbles into they system.. and what I may do is change the position of the carbon reactor return line so that it flows across where my dosing line output is so it pushes it towards the return pump..

 

[UABsleeper]

On a side note I spoke with a Marinedepot rep and have ordered esv bionic two part plus esv mag he said the strengths are relative similar and to start at close to the same level with the exception of mag which I will probably take yalls advice and stop The Mag for a day or two and take measurements to determine my current mag consumption in the tank..

My only hold up with stopping mag is I don’t 100% trust the results of the Red Sea mag test kit I have mainly because their is such a large margin for error and variation that it’s hard to know exactly which result to believe I have changed over to using an insulin syringe so I can get smaller drops and more accurate and smaller drops but still with the difference of .01ml being 20 ppm it makes it hard to trust if a slight change is due to coral consumption or user error