Dosing with Kalkwasser

[Jfountain179]

Having trouble understanding the dosing levels. Is Kalkwasser Mix a daily additive with fresh water top offs or do you add it to the tank everyother day. Please explain how to add this Mix. Thanks

[Sugar Magnolia]

Daily additive. 2 tsp per gallon of RO/DI, mix well and let settle. I just slowly pour mine into a high flow area.

[frank2926]

you need to check your levels to figure out how much your tank is using. It will depend on your bio load. Try using it every other day. If that is maintaining your alk and calcium then thats your timetable. Adjust your use accordingly.

[seapug]

The dosing rate is based on how fast your tank uses it. First buy a reef test kit and see if you actually need it before you start dosing it. Depending on what you have in your tank and what salt mix you use, you may not need it at all. I have some extremely vigorously growing SPS corals in my tank and use Reef Crystals salt mix. My calcium stays over 500 all the time and it's the Alkalinity that gets depleted so the only additive I use is baking soda-- which is much easier to dose than Kalk.

[megan]

seapug

Is that "regular" baking soda?

[seapug]

Yep, plain old Arm & Hammer. 3 teaspoons will raise 50 gallons 2.8 dkh and won't make your ph go out of control. Whenever my dkh goes below 7 I add 3 teaspoons to 1/2 gallon of topoff water and pour it in the sump. No "dosing system" required and has done wonders for my corraline algae growth. For disbelievers and those with a general interest in this, the technique is a outlined in the Reef Aquarium Vol. 4 (purple cover) in the section on correcting calcium and alkalinity imbalances. They reprinted it from this website:

http://www.advancedaquarist.com/issues/nov2002/chem.htm

[frank2926]

This will help

http://home.comcast.net/~jdieck1/chemcalc.html