Time for dosing?

[furcifer208]

My tank is almost a year old. I am doing 250mL (0.3%) daily water changes. Birds nest and montipora have been growing steadily. Acan was doing great but is now looking bad as is a new montipora.

Nitrates and phosphates are at zero. SG is 1.025
Lighting is about 66W from 165W SBox 16 Basic (10% white/30% blue).

date, pH, Ca++, dKH
1/10/19, 8.4, 440, 13
3/24/19 8.4, 300, 9
5/9/19 16, 7.8, 280, 7

Thanks!!!

 

[Ron Reefman]

How deep is your tank?

The range of your pH is fine. Your alk at 7.0 dKH is getting low and you'll need to do a water change or dose alk to bump it up. Ca at 280 ppm is way low, you want it up around 400.

If you bump up your daily water change amount you can push up the alk and dKH levels. Other wise you're going to need to start dosing Ca and alk. You want dKH stable in the 8 to 11 range. Below 6 dKH you risk losing some sps corals. Ca below 350 ppm doesn't give lps or sps corals enough calcium to grow skeleton. You'll also want to test for Mg. You want to be above 1200 up to 1400 ppm as this helps in skeleton building.

I hope that helps?

 

[IslandLifeReef]

I agree with @Ron Reefman, you need to increase your daily water change amount. You are currently only changing a little over 2% a week if your daily water change is 0.3%. You should be changing closer to 10% a week. Try upping your daily water change to 1000 ml per day and see if your Alk and Calcium stabilize before you start dosing. My guess is all of your elements will start to increase since your water started out at much higher levels.

 

[furcifer208]

How deep is your tank?

The range of your pH is fine. Your alk at 7.0 dKH is getting low and you'll need to do a water change or dose alk to bump it up. Ca at 280 ppm is way low, you want it up around 400.

If you bump up your daily water change amount you can push up the alk and dKH levels. Other wise you're going to need to start dosing Ca and alk. You want dKH stable in the 8 to 11 range. Below 6 dKH you risk losing some sps corals. Ca below 350 ppm doesn't give lps or sps corals enough calcium to grow skeleton. You'll also want to test for Mg. You want to be above 1200 up to 1400 ppm as this helps in skeleton building.

I hope that helps?

Thank you that helps! The tank is 13'' deep.

 

[furcifer208]

I agree with @Ron Reefman, you need to increase your daily water change amount. You are currently only changing a little over 2% a week if your daily water change is 0.3%. You should be changing closer to 10% a week. Try upping your daily water change to 1000 ml per day and see if your Alk and Calcium stabilize before you start dosing. My guess is all of your elements will start to increase since your water started out at much higher levels.

Thanks!

 

[PatW]

You have SPS corals. They add to their skeletons rapidly. Right now, larger water changes will probably work. But as the corals grow and thrive, you will eventually have to increase water changes to impractical levels.

Many people who keep SPS corals dose Calcium and alkalinity daily with 2 part additives one for alk and one for Ca. In high demand systems, most reefers automate the system with doser pumps which dose multiple times per day.

I dose 2 part in my SPS tank. I use a soda ash solution for adding ALK and a Calcium chloride solution for adding Calcium. I use BRS two part.

There are four approaches to the problem.

One. Water changes.

Two. Dosing Kalkwasser usually by adding some to the auto top off water. Kalk doses both alk and Ca.

Three. Dosing two part which doses calcium and alk seperately and also doses Mg by a third solution.

Four. Using a calcium reactor. It takes coral rubble plus CO2 to dose everything at once.

BRS has a number of videos on the various methods.

 

[furcifer208]

Thanks everyone for your responses. I increased water changes to 600mL/day. Mrs. Wages arrived and I added 1/8 tsp to the tank and 2 tsp. to 5L reservoir. I figured out how to use the reef calculator. This should bring Ca++ to 320 and Alk to ~12 dKH after 1 week. I also ordered Seachem Reef Complete (CaCl, MgCl and SrCl 100:5:0.1 @160,000 ppm) and plan to add 12.5mL/day for four days. That should get me to 420ppm Ca++ and replenish Mg. I ordered a Salifert Mg test kit since I didn't have one. I am considering doing a 2 gallon (10%) water change today. Will try to test daily.

P.S. We decided the Acan is just splitting. I forgot how bad it looks before that happens. New Montipora is unhappy still (probably Calcium but could be that the Urchin keeps running off with it ).

 

[furcifer208]

Update: Ca++ is at 320 and Alk at 8dKH. I remembered later that I only have about 10 gallons in my system after rocks and substrate. And 5L of saturated kalkwasser was actually way too much. I siphoned the ATO reservoir and replaced with RODI. Will wait until after a trip to dose more CaOH but may add CaCl (~100ppm) if it arrives in time.

 

[IslandLifeReef]

Thanks everyone for your responses. I increased water changes to 600mL/day. Mrs. Wages arrived and I added 1/8 tsp to the tank and 2 tsp. to 5L reservoir. I figured out how to use the reef calculator. This should bring Ca++ to 320 and Alk to ~12 dKH after 1 week. I also ordered Seachem Reef Complete (CaCl, MgCl and SrCl 100:5:0.1 @160,000 ppm) and plan to add 12.5mL/day for four days. That should get me to 420ppm Ca++ and replenish Mg. I ordered a Salifert Mg test kit since I didn't have one. I am considering doing a 2 gallon (10%) water change today. Will try to test daily.

P.S. We decided the Acan is just splitting. I forgot how bad it looks before that happens. New Montipora is unhappy still (probably Calcium but could be that the Urchin keeps running off with it ).

Why do you want your Alk so high? 8-9 dKh should be fine. The higher the Alk, the more nutrients you need to avoid problems. It also gives you less wiggle room if anything else gets out of wack. IMO, I would just increase the water changes for now and see how that works. Changing multiple things at once makes it much more difficult to figure out what actually gave you the results you were looking for.

 

[furcifer208]

@IslandLifeReef (thank you!) I've stopped dosing Kalkwasser and started dosing CaCl. Mg++ test arrived yesterday and am at 1050ppm. Will test again today but ordered Kent Tech M (will arrive tomorrow by 8pm). I've actually returned to 250mL/day water changes and didn't do the large water change. Since I have 5 months of data that way, I'd prefer to try out my three chosen dosing solutions and then figure out how to maintain parameters that way. 250mL/day (0.6% for 10 gallons) water changes seem to be good enough to limit nutrients and the tank seems happy enough.

Here is my strategy for the next two days (before a trip). After I come back, I'll try to get to the center of the box and stay there.

... will I precipitate alkalinity if I add Ca++ before Mg++?

 

[IslandLifeReef]

@IslandLifeReef (thank you!) I've stopped dosing Kalkwasser and started dosing CaCl. Mg++ test arrived yesterday and am at 1050ppm. Will test again today but ordered Kent Tech M (will arrive tomorrow by 8pm). I've actually returned to 250mL/day water changes and didn't do the large water change. Since I have 5 months of data that way, I'd prefer to try out my three chosen dosing solutions and then figure out how to maintain parameters that way. 250mL/day (0.6% for 10 gallons) water changes seem to be good enough to limit nutrients and the tank seems happy enough.

Here is my strategy for the next two days (before a trip). After I come back, I'll try to get to the center of the box and stay there.

... will I precipitate alkalinity if I add Ca++ before Mg++?

Your first post said that 250 ml per day was 0.3% of your tank volume, that is why I suggested upping the water change to closer to 1000 ml per day. I still think that you can fix this simply though increasing the amount of water you change every day since your graph in the first post looks like the elements are decreasing fairly linearly. Changing 0.6% of your water daily is still only changing less than 5% a week while closer to 10% is the usual recommended amount. I'm not trying to convince you to change what you are doing, your plan should work, especially since you are only using a single method. I'm just throwing out an observation. Hope it helps and hope you have a good trip.

 

[furcifer208]

Your first post said that 250 ml per day was 0.3% of your tank volume, that is why I suggested upping the water change to closer to 1000 ml per day. I still think that you can fix this simply though increasing the amount of water you change every day since your graph in the first post looks like the elements are decreasing fairly linearly. Changing 0.6% of your water daily is still only changing less than 5% a week while closer to 10% is the usual recommended amount. I'm not trying to convince you to change what you are doing, your plan should work, especially since you are only using a single method. I'm just throwing out an observation. Hope it helps and hope you have a good trip.

Thanks! Yes, I started out using 20 gallons for my calculations but later realized(remembered) that I only have about 10 gallons of water. I'll probably switch to larger water changes in the future (see postscript below). But I already know how to do water changes and have never dealt with dosing alkalinity, Ca++ and Mg++. So I'm using this as an opportunity to learn. Thanks for your help!

P.S. Sorry, sometimes I'm a bit slow. I guess the benefit of water changes is that it will replace all the things I'm not testing for. I'll up them to 500mL/day on the Jebao DP-4. Then use half the delta between Jan and March to calculate weekly dosing.

P.P.S. And since corals prefer slow changes this would also be a benefit of water changes.

 

[furcifer208]

Update. Tested Mg++ at 1260ppm, Ca++ at 420ppm and Alk at 9dKH. Back in the box! And the new (green) montopora looks a lot happier. Any advice on how to best stay in the box? I'm currently changing water @ 0.5L/day. I thought I might test once a month and add 0.125 tsp of Ms. Wages when things drop? Or 50mL of Kalkwasser? Should I add another 50mL of Mg++ just to be safe (seems to increase by 100ppm)?

 

[linkedsilas]

Isn’t zero on phosphate and nitrates bad? This is how I got dinoflagellates

 

[furcifer208]

Isn’t zero on phosphate and nitrates bad? This is how I got dinoflagellates

When I say zero, I mean by API test. My alkalinity is back down to 7 dKH for some reason. And my calcium is round 390ppm. I added 0.25 tsp. CaOH to the ATO.

 

[furcifer208]

And for some reason my new Salifert alkalinity tests at 5.7dKH.

I think phosphates and nitrates are low because we have a bit on an algae outbreak at the moment. We're hoping to add a tail spot blenny to help soon.

I guess I'm in zone 2 now.