W what is everyone's daily alk consumption trends?

[brahm]

Back on the wagon after nearly a decade off and very excited to play with all these new gadgets. Now that it's so easy to test your alk multiple times a day I'm seeing quite the patterns within my daily alk consumption, and I'm curious as to what other folks are experiencing.


While I'm not surprised that there is a change in alk consumption when the lights are on vs off, I am surprised at the size of the change. I'm seeing nearly 10x the usage during my "peak" lighting period (6pm-12am) running my reactor nearly 30mins every hour and still having a slight decline, down to running it around 3 minutes every hour between 12am-6am and seeing an excess of alk. 6am-6pm is pretty flat seems more like a "ramp" up period, although it's also when my lights are at their brightest around mid day.

My tank is fairly new still (well relative to my old systems) but stable, with around 20 or so small acro frags and a couple small-medium sps.

What are your experiences?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Most people do see most or all alk consumed during the day.

I'm still wondering how much of that is due to light itself impacting corals, and how much is a pH effect.

it is possible, but not easy, to set up a system with the pH cycle reverse to the light cycle, but I've not seen it done yet.

 

[brahm]

Most people do see most or all alk consumed during the day.

I'm still wondering how much of that is due to light itself impacting corals, and how much is a pH effect.

it is possible, but not easy, to set up a system with the pH cycle reverse to the light cycle, but I've not seen it done yet.

Thanks for the promt response (and good to see you it's been a while since we chatted) , that is pretty interesting, and looking at the charts. It seems my ph is rather closely mimicked the alk at least when looking at that day (and with a slight offset). I am also doing some reverse ligthing for a fuge but am not sure how much that is/isn't helping stabalize my ph.

However on a macro level,my alk seems to wander a fair bit while my ph seems some what consistant in terms of the pattern (although the highs and lows difer)? Thoughts?