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Author Topic: Trying to dial in my dosing  (Read 4287 times)

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Offline Heinbaughb

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Trying to dial in my dosing
« on: October 29, 2018, 21:15:50 »
Recently my alkalinity has been being consumed like crazy. Every day or couple days I check my alkalinity and increase it 5-10 ml on my digital timer.  It used to be stable yet things were growing but now it’s getting a little crazy. What do people do when the corals get growing and you’re dosing 2 part?
I don’t currently have a reef controller. Is there something they are able to do that help keep things stable? A Ca reactor would be great but I don’t have room for it under the stand.


During the long trend down slope, I wasn’t always adding my number to ReefTrace but I was still increasing my dosing and seeing it go down.





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Offline SweetReefOH

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #1 on: October 29, 2018, 21:29:51 »
How many mL are you dosing per day?

You know I’ve been dialing back my lighting. In the last 3 months I’ve went from dosing 40mL/day alk, down to 11. So at the moment I’m at 11 alk and 16 Calc to maintain 8.6 and 410 respectively.

Offline Heinbaughb

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Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #2 on: October 29, 2018, 21:31:02 »
80ml Alk and 30ml Ca using BRS sodium Bicarbonate and their bulk calcium dry mix

Edit: 88ml Alk and 33 Ca. I forgot to multiply by 1.1 since I’m using the BRS 1.1 ml dosers


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Offline SweetReefOH

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #3 on: October 29, 2018, 21:34:10 »
Wow, that is a huge difference between alk/Ca. You must be precipitating a lot of alk

Offline Heinbaughb

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #4 on: October 29, 2018, 21:36:01 »
Wow, that is a huge difference between alk/Ca. You must be precipitating a lot of alk

I considered this possibility. Is there anything I would be noticing?


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Offline Warhawk937

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #5 on: October 29, 2018, 21:40:57 »
I just went threw this last month with the brs 2 part. I got tired of chasing numbers. Get the number up to the higher end of what you would like to see. And the dose nothing for 5 days you will see you numbers dropping. Take a 5 day average. there’s your daily dose.  Make sure you get the mag up to 1400 or so first it will help with stability. After I found my daily loss I would dose using the calculator and take measurements daily for another week to ensure I was dialed in
Hope this help good luck

Offline SweetReefOH

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #6 on: October 29, 2018, 21:42:33 »
I don’t know if Sodium Bicarb precipitates like Soda Ash but when I manually dose the 40 too quickly you’ll see a cloudy/milky precipitate in the water.
You can try putting a small powerhead in the chamber that you’re dosing to so you can be sure there’s as little precipitate as possible. Just remember, it my make your levels swing quickly and drastically.

Offline Warhawk937

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #7 on: October 29, 2018, 21:43:53 »
Make sure you dose alk in the morning while your ph is low and calcium in the evening so you don’t have precipitation. Dose alk in a high flow area very slowly.  I Learned the hard way

Offline Heinbaughb

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #8 on: October 29, 2018, 21:50:32 »
Make sure you dose alk in the morning while your ph is low and calcium in the evening so you don’t have precipitation. Dose alk in a high flow area very slowly.  I Learned the hard way
This is good advice but to keep it more stable I have the timers set to dose Alk at the start of even hours and Ca on the start of odd hours.


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Offline Heinbaughb

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #9 on: October 29, 2018, 21:53:17 »
I don’t know if Sodium Bicarb precipitates like Soda Ash but when I manually dose the 40 too quickly you’ll see a cloudy/milky precipitate in the water.
You can try putting a small powerhead in the chamber that you’re dosing to so you can be sure there’s as little precipitate as possible. Just remember, it my make your levels swing quickly and drastically.
I think I might be okay to with the dosing speed. The BRS 1.1 dosers do a slow drip. I can get the levels up..but they don’t stay up. And calcium consumption is not increasing at all. It stays at a steady 500 and doesn’t budge. Mg is 1350.

Hmmm


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Offline Warhawk937

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #10 on: October 29, 2018, 22:02:48 »
Have you tried to start ove on dialing it in with a decent size water change or  hand dosing the alk to get it settled down

Offline Heinbaughb

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #11 on: October 29, 2018, 22:08:55 »
Have you tried to start ove on dialing it in with a decent size water change or  hand dosing the alk to get it settled down
I try to maintain a 10-20% weekly water change schedule. On my Reef trace app, you’ll notice when I hit 7.0 I got a little nervous and manually dosed it back up to around 8, but then it dropped back down. The Alk consumption has been nuts since I added extra T5 bulbs and went fishless from disease. Just ghost feeding for now to keep nutrients up.


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Offline joelbegt

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #12 on: October 30, 2018, 10:17:34 »
Is there a particular reason you choose to dose bicarbonate compared to soda ash?  What does your water change water mix up to?

 In the past I have put both dosing pumps on the same timer and dosed opposite sides of the sump.  I also dosed hourly and base my dose on alkalinity only.  I could add or subtract a second or two every hour once things were stable.  This was also using 2cups soda ash and 2.5 cups calcium chloride of BRS’s older non pharma stuff.

Offline Heinbaughb

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Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #13 on: October 30, 2018, 10:48:25 »
Is there a particular reason you choose to dose bicarbonate compared to soda ash?  What does your water change water mix up to?

 In the past I have put both dosing pumps on the same timer and dosed opposite sides of the sump.  I also dosed hourly and base my dose on alkalinity only.  I could add or subtract a second or two every hour once things were stable.  This was also using 2cups soda ash and 2.5 cups calcium chloride of BRS’s older non pharma stuff.
I’m only using the Sodium Bicarbonate because when I initially wanted to start dosing, I ordered the Kalkwasser kit from BRS and that is what came with it. From what I understand, Soda ash might help with maintaining higher pH. I might try to order that next time.

If I switch to Soda ash, I could double the concentration and my dosing would be closer to the ~2 to 1 ratio I’ve seen other people report using. That would probably help. Thanks Joel.

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« Last Edit: October 30, 2018, 11:08:53 by Heinbaughb »

Offline SweetReefOH

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #14 on: October 30, 2018, 11:37:37 »
Just an observation... the reason the kalk kit came with Sodium Bicarb is because of the effect kalk has on increasing pH. With that being said, you aren’t dosing Kalk (if I’m understanding correctly) so your pH HAS to be in the basement dosing that much Bicarb a day

Offline Heinbaughb

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #15 on: October 30, 2018, 11:59:41 »
Just an observation... the reason the kalk kit came with Sodium Bicarb is because of the effect kalk has on increasing pH. With that being said, you aren’t dosing Kalk (if I’m understanding correctly) so your pH HAS to be in the basement dosing that much Bicarb a day

I’m not sure..I never check pH. I’ve read that the negative effect of bicarb on pH is only slight though from what I’ve read on Randy Holmes Farley’s posts on R2R.


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Offline SweetReefOH

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Re: Trying to dial in my dosing
« Reply #16 on: October 30, 2018, 12:07:24 »
It’s not slight. Over the course of the day, it wouldn’t allow my pH to even get to 8.0

 

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