Dosing issue

[Chiefmaster30]

6 month old tank reboot that I used half new and half 3 yr old live rock to start. Have been dosing brs Randy’s 2 part since after mini cycle first 2 weeks. My reef grade sand has been getting hard. Another issue is that I’m dosing about 71 ml of both parts daily and I think that’s way too high for what little coral I have in tank. Coralline is growing like crazy.... wavemakers are completely covered in corraline, it’s showing up in sump and pretty much everywhere. Problem is I think I may be overdosing 2 part so I turned my dozer off yesterday. Levels went from 8.0 to 6.9 in 24 hrs. Last night I manually dosed to return Alk level to 8.0dkh. Should I turn dosed back on? Is this normal dosing amount? Tank is 80 Rimless with 40 breeder sump. Pic of the few coral I have in tank.

 

[Ron Reefman]

You'll need to keep the alk level up or you'll lose lps and sps corals.

You never mentioned your Ca level or Mg level? Both of these can go down low and corals will survive but not grow or grow very slowly. But high levels can contribute to a hard crusty surface to develop on the sand.

 

[Chiefmaster30]

You'll need to keep the alk level up or you'll lose lps and sps corals.

You never mentioned your Ca level or Mg level? Both of these can go down low and corals will survive but not grow or grow very slowly. But high levels can contribute to a hard crusty surface to develop on the sand.

Thanks for response. My mag is 1400 and cal is 390

 

[Chiefmaster30]

To keep my levels stable, should I turn my dosed back on or manually dose every night. I’m trying to figure out if I’m overdosing or not.

 

[homer1475]

If your sandbed is turning hard, your dosing too much. Had this happen to me early on in my reefing career. My sandbed turned to a solid brick(was not fun trying to get it out of the tank). What Randy suggested to me years ago was to switch to just plain baking soda(Randy's recipe 2).

 

[Chiefmaster30]

Can anyone give me more advice here please? I understand I’m overdosing but.... what do I need to do about it? Should I switch to kalk? A different additive?

 

[Mayerlyn A]

Hopefully someone with more experience chimes in as i am no expert. I was able to maintain my parameters for the first year using kalk alone. You would have to get your levels to where you want them first. Brs calculator works great to adjust your levels to recommended range. Your Ca is too low which I think is leading to precipitation issues with your alk.

I hope that makes sense and hopefully someone with more experience will comment.

 

[dhof]

Can anyone give me more advice here please? I understand I’m overdosing but.... what do I need to do about it? Should I switch to kalk? A different additive?

I switched to a new tank with new substrate and had a very similar problem to what you are describing. I've battled it for several months mostly through trial and error, so I'm no real expert, but I think I'm finally stable...

1. Manually dose Bicarb and Calcium to bring your tank to a target level that you will aim at for a few months. Dose calcium first very slowly, and then after a half hour dose the bicarb very slowly. Maybe target something like 8.0dkh and 440 calcium. That way, if they drop a little from precipitation or other reasons, things are still safe in your tank.
2. Anecdotally, I've found that stirring the substrate every few days with jets from a thin coral feeder really mixes it up and helps to stop the 'crusting' you are experiencing. Maybe as a temporary measure stir up your substrate every day or two for the next few months.
3. Also anecdotally, don't underestimate how much precipitation can occur on the glass of your sump where your dosing line drops things. A small white crust on the glass in that location would be a sign that you might need to reposition your dosing lines and/or place a wavemaker in your sump to help. I installed a wavemaker in my sump and had to move my dosing lines about 4 inches away from the glass to finally be rid of the crust that formed near the dosing tubes on the glass.
4. I do think that it makes sense to switch to sodium bicarbonate for daily dosing (instead of soda ash) for a period of time (1-2 months). The bicarb dose will be about 2x as many mL as you are using for Soda Ash and will be 2x your daily dosing of Calcium. Bicarb is less likely to cause precipitation, so it may give your substrate a chance to get some biological covering over whatever precipitate does exist on it. After a few months of this, you can easily switch back to soda ash by halving the daily bicarb dose that is being used once your tank is stable.
5. I have a 40 breeder with a 29gallon sump. My tank is a bit more heavily stocked than yours. One of my biggest errors was similar to yours, in that I thought my 80mL of daily alk/cal was too much for my coral load. I was seeing precipitation near my dosing tubes on the glass, and my substrate was clumping, and I was advised to lower the daily dose. After months and months and months of fighting things, no matter what I did, I would still lose 0.2dkh per day, pretty much whatever I lowered my daily dose to. Doing a 24 hour non-dosing period, that showed I only needed like 40ml per day, but dosing 40ml per day was awful in that my levels dropped seriously fast. I eventually got back to my 80mL per day, and still was losing 0.2dkh per day. I did this for a few months and the 0.2dkh loss wasn't really hurting anything. As a last resort I calculated the 0.2dkh per day loss on top of the 80 and determined that 95mL per day is what the tank is saying it needs. 95mL is a crazy high amount for my 55gallon water volume, but I was at my wits end and decided to try it. tank has been stable for a month ever since I went to 95. So my moral of the story here is: switch to bicarb for a few months. Find a relatively stable place with bicarb. Get to a point where you are maybe losing 0.1 or 0.2dkh per day and don't be afraid to go higher if your tank needs it and you aren't having precipitation. If you are losing 0.2dkh per day, and you decide to up your daily dose, don't react after 1 day, give it like 3 or 4 days at the new dose before you react by upping the dose even more. If you get to a point where you are only losing a few points of dkh per day, I would NOT manually dose each day to bring to a new level, that just adds way too many factors to screw things up. You will catch back up to the 8.0dkh target with your weekly water change (if using a high dkh salt) I'd start this 2 month experiment thing off in your case by dosing 70mL of Calcium and 140mL of Bicarb and watch/record things for 2 weeks and then start incrementally adjusting your daily dose from there. After 2 or 3 months you should be stable enough to switch back to soda ash.

Good luck...

 

[Ron Reefman]

You need to get the tank dosed close to the parameters you want. Then an hour later test to make sure you are where you want to be. After that, no more dosing!

I'd start testing your parameters every 12 hours for a couple of days and if things don't change too much, start testing every day at the same time. After some period of time a day or a week, your parameters will be down close to as low as you should be willing to let them get. Then you need to work with a chemistry calculater like this: http://reef.diesyst.com/chemcalc/chemcalc.html

Calculate how much Ca and alk (and even Mg if it changed much at all) to get back to your original parameters. Then divide the amount you need to dose by the number of days between the start and end of the test. That's how much you should be dosing every day.

Example:
You start the test on May 20th and your parameters are Ca 440, alk 10dKH and Mg 1400.
After 10 days of testing (it really shouldn't take 10 days, I just picked it to make the math easy!) your parameters are Ca 350, alk 5.0dKH and Mg 1375.

The chemistry calculater says you need 1470 ml of Ca, 570 ml of alk and 60ml of Mg (I used Dow Flake since I don't know what you use.

Divid those amounts by the 10 days of the test and you get:
147 ml of Ca, 57 ml of alk and 6 ml of Mg.

Until things get added to the tank or things in the tank grow up and use more of these chemicals, you should be good. I'd still test every 3 or 4 days until you are sure it's working as expected. Then you could drop down to testing once a week. My tank got so stable that I only tested once a month for over 2 years and only had to make very small changes every quarter or so.

Good luck.

 

[Chiefmaster30]

I switched to a new tank with new substrate and had a very similar problem to what you are describing. I've battled it for several months mostly through trial and error, so I'm no real expert, but I think I'm finally stable...

1. Manually dose Bicarb and Calcium to bring your tank to a target level that you will aim at for a few months. Dose calcium first very slowly, and then after a half hour dose the bicarb very slowly. Maybe target something like 8.0dkh and 440 calcium. That way, if they drop a little from precipitation or other reasons, things are still safe in your tank.
2. Anecdotally, I've found that stirring the substrate every few days with jets from a thin coral feeder really mixes it up and helps to stop the 'crusting' you are experiencing. Maybe as a temporary measure stir up your substrate every day or two for the next few months.
3. Also anecdotally, don't underestimate how much precipitation can occur on the glass of your sump where your dosing line drops things. A small white crust on the glass in that location would be a sign that you might need to reposition your dosing lines and/or place a wavemaker in your sump to help. I installed a wavemaker in my sump and had to move my dosing lines about 4 inches away from the glass to finally be rid of the crust that formed near the dosing tubes on the glass.
4. I do think that it makes sense to switch to sodium bicarbonate for daily dosing (instead of soda ash) for a period of time (1-2 months). The bicarb dose will be about 2x as many mL as you are using for Soda Ash and will be 2x your daily dosing of Calcium. Bicarb is less likely to cause precipitation, so it may give your substrate a chance to get some biological covering over whatever precipitate does exist on it. After a few months of this, you can easily switch back to soda ash by halving the daily bicarb dose that is being used once your tank is stable.
5. I have a 40 breeder with a 29gallon sump. My tank is a bit more heavily stocked than yours. One of my biggest errors was similar to yours, in that I thought my 80mL of daily alk/cal was too much for my coral load. I was seeing precipitation near my dosing tubes on the glass, and my substrate was clumping, and I was advised to lower the daily dose. After months and months and months of fighting things, no matter what I did, I would still lose 0.2dkh per day, pretty much whatever I lowered my daily dose to. Doing a 24 hour non-dosing period, that showed I only needed like 40ml per day, but dosing 40ml per day was awful in that my levels dropped seriously fast. I eventually got back to my 80mL per day, and still was losing 0.2dkh per day. I did this for a few months and the 0.2dkh loss wasn't really hurting anything. As a last resort I calculated the 0.2dkh per day loss on top of the 80 and determined that 95mL per day is what the tank is saying it needs. 95mL is a crazy high amount for my 55gallon water volume, but I was at my wits end and decided to try it. tank has been stable for a month ever since I went to 95. So my moral of the story here is: switch to bicarb for a few months. Find a relatively stable place with bicarb. Get to a point where you are maybe losing 0.1 or 0.2dkh per day and don't be afraid to go higher if your tank needs it and you aren't having precipitation. If you are losing 0.2dkh per day, and you decide to up your daily dose, don't react after 1 day, give it like 3 or 4 days at the new dose before you react by upping the dose even more. If you get to a point where you are only losing a few points of dkh per day, I would NOT manually dose each day to bring to a new level, that just adds way too many factors to screw things up. You will catch back up to the 8.0dkh target with your weekly water change (if using a high dkh salt) I'd start this 2 month experiment thing off in your case by dosing 70mL of Calcium and 140mL of Bicarb and watch/record things for 2 weeks and then start incrementally adjusting your daily dose from there. After 2 or 3 months you should be stable enough to switch back to soda ash.

Good luck...

Thank you for all the info given. Sounds like a good plan now that you broke it down like that for me. Thanks

 

[Chiefmaster30]

You need to get the tank dosed close to the parameters you want. Then an hour later test to make sure you are where you want to be. After that, no more dosing!

I'd start testing your parameters every 12 hours for a couple of days and if things don't change too much, start testing every day at the same time. After some period of time a day or a week, your parameters will be down close to as low as you should be willing to let them get. Then you need to work with a chemistry calculater like this: http://reef.diesyst.com/chemcalc/chemcalc.html

Calculate how much Ca and alk (and even Mg if it changed much at all) to get back to your original parameters. Then divide the amount you need to dose by the number of days between the start and end of the test. That's how much you should be dosing every day.

Example:
You start the test on May 20th and your parameters are Ca 440, alk 10dKH and Mg 1400.
After 10 days of testing (it really shouldn't take 10 days, I just picked it to make the math easy!) your parameters are Ca 350, alk 5.0dKH and Mg 1375.

The chemistry calculater says you need 1470 ml of Ca, 570 ml of alk and 60ml of Mg (I used Dow Flake since I don't know what you use.

Divid those amounts by the 10 days of the test and you get:
147 ml of Ca, 57 ml of alk and 6 ml of Mg.

Until things get added to the tank or things in the tank grow up and use more of these chemicals, you should be good. I'd still test every 3 or 4 days until you are sure it's working as expected. Then you could drop down to testing once a week. My tank got so stable that I only tested once a month for over 2 years and only had to make very small changes every quarter or so.

Good luck.

The problem I’m haveing with stopping dosing is. I turned my doser off the other day for 24 hrs and my Alk dropped from 8.0-6.7 dkh. I can’t have my Alk drop any more than that or I’ll lose everything I got especially my lps and sps.

 

[Ron Reefman]

So dose the alk level up to 10 and then try going at least 48 hours and test every 12 hours. If you drop from 10 to 6 over the next 3 days you'll know you drop 1.3 dKH every day and need to dose 'X' amount to keep it at whatever dKH level you want to hold it at. Pushing alk up to 10 or even 12 dKH isn't going to be harmful, especially if your alk useage is 1.3 dKH every day! Then set your dosing pump and keep testing until you are 100% confident you got it right.

 

[dhof]

So dose the alk level up to 10 and then try going at least 48 hours and test every 12 hours. If you drop from 10 to 6 over the next 3 days you'll know you drop 1.3 dKH every day and need to dose 'X' amount to keep it at whatever dKH level you want to hold it at. Pushing alk up to 10 or even 12 dKH isn't going to be harmful, especially if your alk useage is 1.3 dKH every day! Then set your dosing pump and keep testing until you are 100% confident you got it right.

I agree that this is the typical approach people mention that should work, but the OP has active precipitation going on, which might alter the effectiveness of this approach. When I was having precipitation issues, dosing to a higher dkh just caused even more precipitation, and then the drop in dkh I observed was not really correct for what the tank needed. Some people say that the effect of precipitation is not really that large, but in my case it messed with things enough to make the normal approach of measuring a 48 hr drop in dkh difficult.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

FWIW, a drop of 1.1 dKH in 24 h is pretty typical.