Starting to dose kalk. Any tips?

Scorchx1245 · Jul 11, 2018

So I want to start dosing or adding kalk. With my weekly 5-10 % water changes I'm slowly losing calc and all for the past month. My dkh has slipped slowly from 8 down to 6 in the past 2 months. Calcium is down as well. I didnt have enough left to do a test this week, will be grabbing a new re-ageb fill tomorrow. But I'm using an ATO but dont really want to add kalk to my ATO till I get another aqualifter pump, my current pump is pumping about 30gph so I feel it might add to much to fast. Any tips or thoughts should I get a dripper or wait? First time adding anything was mostly lps in my nano. Now I've got some sps frags just 2 birdsnest that were added 3 weeks ago, candy canes, a couple hammers, gsp, torch etc. Lighting LEDs with 2 bulb t5 fixture. 10 gallon sump on a 40 gallon breeder. Gonna swap out the LEDs for kessils later...so any tips on using kalk?

chipmunkofdoom2 · Jul 12, 2018

I personally don't like adding kalk through an ATO. Even the reliable ones are too prone to failure for my liking. Plus, as you said, the pumps are usually not the most precise.

I dose my lime water with a dosing pump. I make a fully-saturated solution (2 tsp/gallon). I then did some calculations to determine how much I would need to dose per day and started there. At times, my calcium and carbonate alkalinity trend too high, and I lower the daily dose. At times, they're too low, and I increase the daily dose. Much simpler than worrying about the concentration of the calcium hydroxide solution in my ATO. And, because my ATO is separate from the calcium hydroxide doser, when I decrease or increase the lime water dose, the ATO just picks up the slack to make sure the water level stays stable.

Scorchx1245 · Jul 12, 2018

Thank you definitely gonna get a dose then.

JBKReef · Jul 12, 2018

I would agree with this approach as well. It will keep it saturated and dose exactly what you put in, those dosing pumps rarely fail and if they do even rarer to fail in a way that dumps the contents. It will require more frequent testing, but once dialed in should be easy to adjust from there.

Randy Holmes-Farley · Jul 13, 2018

Let's put this in perspective. Your demand may be VERY low. (1 dKH per month is VERY low, if that's how fast it would drop at 8 dKH, it is hard to judge because demand pretty much stops at 6 dKH), and using an ATO, even with fast delivery would work fine.

You'd be delivering less than 0.1 dKH per day, which would be added all at once once a day with no issue, and even if it varied by 100% on a daily basis, due to evaporation, there is not any concern.

IMO, the first step is to get a better measure of the demand at your actual target level.

Midrats · Jul 13, 2018

I dose limewater with my ATO, but my ATO is a Litermeter so there aren't any worries about floats or optical sensors. The daily evaporation is replaced with multiple small doses over 24 hours. I simply set it to dose what the tank evaporates and adjust the strength of the limewater as needed. In Winter when the evaporation increases I lower the concentration of the limewater as more of it gets dosed. This has been working well for me since 1998.

Scorchx1245 · Jul 13, 2018

Thanks all for the suggestions! I will be switching over to the ato method. I mixed up the solution yesterday and added to my ATO after careful looking. ( let it settle over night and suspended my tube for my aqualifter off the bottom) My ato is a 2 gallon container so since my demand is so low I only used 1 tsp. (Evap around a 1/4 gallon a day) I will be monitoring the DKH and calc daily and writing them down if I notice it slightly going up I'll re adjust to a smaller amount, say knock off a 1/4 if it goes down, goes up, I will add a 1/4 tsp, is this the right approach? I'm currently using salifert test kits. Still waiting on my calcium kit to arrive. I have an API calc test kit but I don't trust api very much.