over dosing or not dosing enough

lilbitreefer · Nov 19, 2018

Ok, so I was originally dosing 33 ml/day of two part. I added some coral. My calcium has routinely been low 373 th elast few weeks while alk has been around 10.25. After adding the coral I started noticing my pH is having really weird swings in the morning when the alk is dosed. Instead of having a nice sinusoidal wave through out the day I am seeing two peaks and dips. When I rechecked the calcium was still low 377 so I increased the dosing to 40 ml/day. My pH is continuing to decrease and still having the weird peaks and troughs. I am waiting for more calicium reagents to come in to check that level but my alk is still remaining around 10. Any thoughts?

The corals I added were two small monitopora frags, a acropora and pocilapora frag. I do have a small clam in the tank but he has been in there for a long time. After moving my pocilapora to a higher position on the tank it has decided to die off suddenly. I plan to move it back down to a lower part of the tank when I get home tomorrow.

One other thing that has changed in my tank which I do not think would affect the pH would be I added zeovit, to an already low nutrient tank.

rkpetersen · Nov 19, 2018

Looks like you're getting an acute pH spike up around 7 or 8 AM, likely from something added. You mention adding alk around that time, and that would surely account for it. After that, the tank eventually returns to its normal diurnal daytime pH rise pattern. If you break your alk dosing up into more smaller doses, your pH pattern should normalize. Some people like to run alk as a series of small doses at night, to counter the normal nighttime pH drop, although I'd rather let that happen naturally and so I just dose micro amounts of alk at frequent intervals throughout the day and night.

lilbitreefer · Nov 20, 2018

I have been doing it with an apex dose that doses over an hour. Should I break it up even more? before the coral addition I had a good diurnal pattern going.