Help with sudden alk rise !

[hans4811]

I think I saw a video from ACI aquaculture that said that kalkwasser can free up carbonates bound to rock and other things. Maybe that is what happened here. In the same video he talked about how a friend of his dosing kalk using his method had his alk jump to like 13 or something crazy but his corals were doing fine. His hypothesis is as long as the changes in ph are slow, then you are good reguardless of changes in alk (at least increases in alk).

This makes the most sense and what I had in my mind as well. My ph was fine during the period in question, 12/12-12/19. In fact, it was quite an eye opener on how much my Kalk dosing was improving my ph when I shut off the Kalk dosing yesterday at around this time…7am…including a graph…

you can see a little dip around the 16th, but nothing like the dip when I turned Kalk off on mon the 19th @7am thru the end of graph this morning…a 0.2 drop !

was thinking about just stop dosing Kalk altogether and go back to straight 2 part, but now……maybe not ! lol….

 

[hans4811]

Well…just tested alk even though this isn’t my normal testing time (around noon) but I did this yesterday at same time and it was 9.4dkh and now it’s gone back down to 8.2…my normal range. And this was after i turned off both Kalk and alk dosing yesterday at this same time….and I sort of expected this knowing my daily consumption rate was around 0.5-1.0dkh.

I just turned my Kalk and alk dosing back on and I’ll test again at my normal time later on to see….my Kalk is being dosed 24/7, but my alk isn’t until 1am.

Maybe just an aberration …. Another reefing mystery !

 

[matt_work27]

I think I saw a video from ACI aquaculture that said that kalkwasser can free up carbonates bound to rock and other things. Maybe that is what happened here. In the same video he talked about how a friend of his dosing kalk using his method had his alk jump to like 13 or something crazy but his corals were doing fine. His hypothesis is as long as the changes in ph are slow, then you are good reguardless of changes in alk (at least increases in alk).

Well…just tested alk even though this isn’t my normal testing time (around noon) but I did this yesterday at same time and it was 9.4dkh and now it’s gone back down to 8.2…my normal range. And this was after i turned off both Kalk and alk dosing yesterday at this same time….and I sort of expected this knowing my daily consumption rate was around 0.5-1.0dkh.

I just turned my Kalk and alk dosing back on and I’ll test again at my normal time later on to see….my Kalk is being dosed 24/7, but my alk isn’t until 1am.

Maybe just an aberration …. Another reefing mystery !

interesting, as long as the corals are doing fine I would say you are in the green. But either way I hope you figure it out.

 

[hans4811]

Just a quick update…

First off, everything is fine, corals,fish. Second, got the dKH back to normal and I’m now in the process of rebalancing the amounts used between the Kalk and BW Alk8.3p.

Was originally using the max evaporation rate of 3.6L/day. This started causing an issue in these colder months, with less evaporation, to overfill the sump…not huge but enough where my OCD compelled me to adjust !

So I’m in the process of decreasing the Kalk amount down to 2L/day and mixing a stronger solution of the BW Alk8.3P product….from 50g/L to 80g/L…and increasing that from 120ml/day to 125ml. Last check yesterday was 9.0dkh, which was a bit high for me, reduced the amount back to 120ml and waiting to recheck the dKH today at lunch.

A thought occurred to me in that I haven’t replaced the tubing and/or the roller inside the DOS pump since I bought the unit and it’s been running a bit with this Kalk, so maybe something just slipped for a brief period. I checked a random dosage amount a couple of times and that seems fine, but still…worth replacing I feel.

So I’m investigating that now…seems Neptune doesn’t sell the tubing or roller head separately, just the whole head unit for like $35 ! Well, 3 DOS units x 2 heads per….NOT an option ! Seems Avast sells a 4 roller unit vs a stock 2 that is a direct replacement and trying to source the tubing…

Thx for reading…

 

[hans4811]

Found this from an old post….

https://www.avastmarine.com/products/replacement-pump-roller?_pos=1&_sid=462bf4d4b&_ss=r

And a reviewer from that said that he used this tubing…

https://www.usplastic.com/catalog/item.aspx?itemid=25399

…..“These rollers work perfectly with the Neptune Dos, they have 4 rollers instead of 2 which increases reliability and accuracy of each dose. Along with these I purchased replacement peristaltic tubing from U.S. Plastic that is specifically designed for these pumps.”