Honeymoon period of new stony reef: and kalk: fyi

[Sk8r]

If you use the basic coral salt mix (reef salt), your new tank if properly lighted will have a 'nice' period in which corals extend and look happy. If they're stony, still true. Doing your 10% water change weekly will help maintain that happy period.

But as your tank ages, and as stony corals get hungrier, they will start sucking the calcium out of your salt mix hand over fist. In my 52 stony reef, with only 4 corals, I found I was dosing a lot of calcium daily just to keep up with it...as in...multiple spoonfuls.

This is where you HAVE to start feeding it something cheaper than 18.00 a jar. What you need is kalk, so long as kalk can keep up with it. In a reef under 75 gallons, even up to 100 gallons, you can probably do nicely with that.

If you will pre-set (by dosing with supplements) your numbers where mine are (8.3 alkalinity, 420 calcium, 1350 magnesium) and put 2 tsp kalk powder into your topoff reservoir---that's 2 tsp per gallon of ro/di, natural evaporation and topping off will feed your corals nicely: the mg doesn't deplete fast at all, and the kalk is both maintaining your alkalinity and supplying calcium. Instead of 18.00 a jar for calcium powder, you can spend 5.00 for a pound or so of Mrs. Wages Pickling Lime, or whatever 'kalk' you can find. Life will be a lot easier, and those numbers will never fall until the mg sinks below 1200. Keep your nitrate at about 5, your alk/cal/mg where I state above, your lighting adequate, and really just watching the mg (magnesium) in weekly tests will tell you that that chemistry is still locked. If you keep adding more ro/di and kalk and mg, you can parlay that into months of stability.

Easy? Here's how easy. It's real hard to overdose kalk. ONLY 2 tsp per gallon can dissolve in ro/di under normal ph, so just don't panic if you get a white residue on the bottom---it's just undissolved kalk, which WILL dissolved when you add more water. I have a big reservoir and normally just drop a pound in. If you do white-out your tank in a topoff accident, worry more about the salinity because of the fresh water flood than you do about the white powder, which will gradually dissolve and get used. Take a turkey baster to puff it off your corals, and don't panic. If your ph spikes way up, one teaspoon of Schweppe's Bar Soda per 50 gallons of system water will bring it down fast: it sinks pretty fast on its own, so don't overdose the bar soda. Mostly, it's self-correcting.

I don't have a controller. I don't hate them, just never got one. I use Salifert tests, Kent supplements. Using this system I can go off on the road for a month and come back to a happy, well-fed reef.

[heathlindner25]

I don t think I've seen your 52 stony reef.

[Stolireef]

Do you have a mixing pump in your reservoir?

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[Sk8r]

No. I have a pump that comes on only to deliver kalk-water. [Eheim: it's tough]

The 52 stony reef is history: that tank is now freshwater planted.

[jayball]

Originally Posted by Stolireef

Do you have a mixing pump in your reservoir?

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You do not want to mix your Kalk, it will precipitate out the solution to Calcium Carbonate then it will be useless to your coral. That is the crust that builds up on top of your kalk container (protecting it from further contamination) and the white out you get when it gets dumped in too quickly.

[AlSimmons]

Yeah, once the Kalkwasser dissolves your pretty much done mixing. Put a tight fitting lid on the container, maybe let it sit for an hour or so and you should be good to go.
On a side note; I made a new batch yesterday and forgot all about it. It must have mixed for a least an hour which is definitely not recommended, but I refused to throw that batch out and start a new one. Here it is almost 24 hours later and so far so good. Go figure...

[biecacka]

Sk8tr,
I have a question for you. But first let me start off by saying I know what my main issue is here in this set up and I'm open to changing that giving it's a feasible solution in my small apartment.

I use a 5 gallon bucket for my ATO, it is plumbed into my RO/DI unit so it constantly fills itself as it is being used. How could I incorporate kalk into the ATO seeing as how it changes.i used to run kalk and liked stability, now I use a CaRx and I like it, but my mag drops and then everything else does too.

Corey

[Sk8r]

If I miss your question, tell me, but it seems to me all you have to do is add kalk to that ATO bucket, and add more than you need: ONLY 2 tsp per gallon is even able to dissolve in ro/di no matter what---so you could dump a pound of Mrs. Wages Pickling Lime into that reservoir, stir, let it settle, and as water is drawn out, and more water comes in, the 'emptiness' of the entering ro/di will allow more kalk to dissolve.
This has one serious problem: you have to prop that pump up out of the white slurry of kalk at the bottom (where undissolved kalk will settle out and whence new water will find kalk to dissolve) ---and you pretty well need an Eheim pump, the ONLY one I've found that kalk won't chew up. I've had a little Eheim running in my 32 gallon reservoir for 2-3 years now.
Measuring kalk addition is not really necessary: ONLY 2 tsp per gallon of ro/di is able to dissolve [there is a trick of adding vinegar to get more to dissolve [which changes the ph---but let's not go there]. I wouldn't advise gross overdose because it's messy---but figure your evaporation rate, then dose sufficient extra kalk to handle, say, the next week, and add more kalk when you run your water tests, just part of the routine. For mine, eg, at a gallon a day evaporation, it would be 14 extra teaspoons, or a third of a cup extra kalk into my 32 gallon reservoir. If it autofilled.

[biecacka]

Sounds simple enough. I use a tunze ATO so I would just drop a small pump in there to occasionally turn on to help with new water or is that not needed. Then I would just put the tunze unit on some egg crate to get it up off the bottom.

Thanks

corey

[Sk8r]

That should do it.