Yep, I've personally been doing this for 2 years. I suffered from 7.8 pH just like most hobbyists and never understood how people get their acros to grow so fast. Turns out pH is the key.
Although my method is slightly different than Chris Meckley's, the end results are the same.
I have my apex communicate with a custom kalk controller i made that incorporates a custom kalk reactor.
I think that stems from getting around apex fusions native software. In fusion you're telling it to dose twice the amount, but because he suggest to only dose during a 12 hour period at night, it only doses half. It's just a clever way to overcome the hurdles in fusion.
I never really liked the DOS because of that reason. Which is partly why I made my own controller.
Chris Meckley seems to be dubbed the father of this idea. I was on a phone call with him a few weeks ago. It was interesting, when we were talking about elevated alkalinity, he peaked at 13.6 and when I went back into my logs, I noticed that I peaked at 13.6 as well. if Randy does chime in, I'd be curious if this is just coincidence or if there's something to hitting a alkalinity peak before precipitating.
Most people that I talk to gets scared when the alk gets above 10. I don't know what makes corals tolerate elevated alkalinity levels. I could only imagine that it has to do with the stable pH.
Here's a graph of the last 7 days on my tank pH.
I tested alkalinity yesterday and it is holding steady at 10.4.
This very well may be true, I 1st heard about it from one coral farmer, and then another. It made me sit up and pay more attention. I started to try and make the apex do what I wanted, the main draw back was not being able to read pH at the 12.44 range. That forced me to make my own circuit to talk to apex.
After I was doing it for a while, I found out that Chris has been basically doing it the same way with some slight differences.
I was glad I stumbled across him, it was a relief to read how he was experiencing most of what I was and that dispite obvious concerns he was letting it ride without any issue.
Is this for everyone? I would say, "absolutely not". There's so much that can go wrong, and I think you have to have some experience under your belt to spot any problems that may arise. I also think that a well stocked reef tank with adequate calcium carbonate demand needs to be established, or else you will start precipitating, which, I assume, is one of Randy's reasons for it being "bad idea".
Finally if I'm being honest, I think the corals are growing too fast. It's like playing a game and you discovered a cheat code... everyone knows, when you play a game using cheat codes, the thrill is no longer there.
I'll leave you with a visual of my tank. Note that 2 years ago my tank looked like most tanks starting out. A bunch of small frags glued to substrate.
