FlyinBryan
Well-Known Member
I've been a huge advocate for kalk, once I started using I thought it made a huge impact on my tank, for a couple of years. Things looked great and were growing to a certain extent. Because I travel so much for my job, I let the testing slide, quite a bit.
I switched over to LED lights back in Sept and haven't seen the strong growth I generally like to see, especially from my zoa's.
I got a second wind of motivation the last couple of weeks for testing so I thought I'd check every 24 hours to see where I was at. I have a 29g biocube, and a 150.
The test over a 3 day period on the 29g went from alk 3.0dkh to 7dkh then back down to 4.25dkh, all within 36 hours. And I didn't do anything to the tank. Even the testing in the 150 is going through wild swings daily.
I don't have, IMO, overstocked tanks of corals. The 29g has a few sps growing slowly and zoa's that exist but are not growing, at all.
Like I said initially, I loved kalk, that I could just set the levels and kalk would help maintain in ATO! For the 29g I have like a 8 gallon reservoir and the 150 I have a 30 gallon bucket, both with max kalk for max saturation.
But swings like what I'm seeing are just crazy and can't be healthy for tank.
I'm testing using the Hannah checker, which by all accounts, the reagent is new, the batteries were recently replaced.
Does alk just evaporate? Should I just leave alk low and not worry about, switch out lights back to mh & t5's?
salinity is 1.025 and mg is 1350.
Thank you in advance.
I switched over to LED lights back in Sept and haven't seen the strong growth I generally like to see, especially from my zoa's.
I got a second wind of motivation the last couple of weeks for testing so I thought I'd check every 24 hours to see where I was at. I have a 29g biocube, and a 150.
The test over a 3 day period on the 29g went from alk 3.0dkh to 7dkh then back down to 4.25dkh, all within 36 hours. And I didn't do anything to the tank. Even the testing in the 150 is going through wild swings daily.
I don't have, IMO, overstocked tanks of corals. The 29g has a few sps growing slowly and zoa's that exist but are not growing, at all.
Like I said initially, I loved kalk, that I could just set the levels and kalk would help maintain in ATO! For the 29g I have like a 8 gallon reservoir and the 150 I have a 30 gallon bucket, both with max kalk for max saturation.
But swings like what I'm seeing are just crazy and can't be healthy for tank.
I'm testing using the Hannah checker, which by all accounts, the reagent is new, the batteries were recently replaced.
Does alk just evaporate? Should I just leave alk low and not worry about, switch out lights back to mh & t5's?
salinity is 1.025 and mg is 1350.
Thank you in advance.
