I run Ca reactor without a kalk reactor. My Ph is 8.3 to 8.1 in the tank, in reactor 6.8 to 6.6. My Ca was at 450ppm, alk was 3.43, mg was 1200. I added 200gm of Mg and the alk went up to 3.89 with the ph going up 0.12 in one hour. Mg is now 1300ppm.
I was told once that Mg was the middle of the tetertater, between Ca and alk. If one wont go up but the other will, check your Mg level. I don't know if this is true or not, but it worked for me.:mrgreen:

I'll have to test Mg. It's surely too low, it's been a few weeks since I last tested. I want to find a solid based Mg supplement I can run in my reactor because the liquid Kent stuff I tried last month didn't last me very long, I don't think that will be a long-term economical solution.

My Salifert Alk test kit finally finished on me, so I went and bought an Elos. The Elos measures in dKH instead of meq/l. It tells me my Alk is 12dKH so 12/2.8 = 4.29ish meq/l.

Yeah, time to get on that Mg and see if that's part of the issue here I guess.

You can put some dolomite in the Ca reactor to help with this, might be tough to find a pure enough source though.

Tony, a while back there was some at Gold. Since its snowing it might be a good day to hit Deerfoot :lol: .

For using the reactor for Magnesium see Zeomag being used also, not sure if easier to source than dolomite.

Not sure if I can/could recommend the Magflake from littleilvermax as only been using a little over a month, but found after getting the Mg in system up, it's staying fairly constant (1200-1300ppm, ELOS so don't have the resolution) . I haven't had to add to the display since the start and just been making sure the water for changes is at 1300ppm and it's seems in-expensive.

Back to the alk and MG. Found before I was testing and supplementing for Mg (assume ~900 ppm based on IO salt) my alk was 10dKH, (Ca 350-380). Now since adding Ca/Mg (testing at Ca 400-425 and Mg 1200-1300) in addition to reactor, finding if anything alk now steadily up also to 11dKH.

reading all this makes me want to get Salifert all in one Calcium
I think its Ok for tanks up to 70 Gal to keep up with the Calcium demand...

I use Rowalith C+ for media which is the same as the LFS use's. I used Epnson salts to bring my Mg up to where it should be. I would like to get a kalkwasser mixer to run at night to bring my ph up to a nice stead level.

I thinking of usiing a ph controled to maintane my ph level, but not sure that with work as planned. Ca reactor runs to bring down the ph and Kalk reactor come on when the ph drops. Hopefully that with work. I would set the ph at 8.4 to 8.2 and hope to maintane the Ca and alk level at the same time. I think that would work better if it could moniter the Ca and ALk level to where they should be. Pipe dream or I haven't built the computer to do this.:smile:

Um, sounds almost perfect to me, thoes are pretty much the numbers I shot for in my tank. I maintained 380 Ca and about 12 alk and found that was the best numbers for growth and color in my tank.

Steve

I used to think those numbers were perfect too, but it seems to me the current thinking is that an ideal alk is closer to about 3meq/l. Also, apparently with the current thinking on ULNS tanks (Zeovit, Ultralith, Plyplaps, etc.) that your target Alk actually "needs to be" in the 3.0 to 3.4 (max) range (I'm not 100% certain on this but I think I've heard that).

My main concern though was that I was finding that I was going well above 4.0meq/l, at one point I had an alk close to 4.8 meq/l. Things were looking pretty unhappy at that point.

However, since then I have backed off the reactor and the Alk seems to be settling in around 3.4. I'm happier with this although my metering pump that is feeding the reactor is dialed down to basically nil. I suppose that's OK but I'm always happier if I can have an adjustment knob set somewhere in the middle of its range rather than at one of the extremes (ie. if you listen to stereo and the volume is always set to 10 {out of 10} then something's not right. Similarly if you find it's "way too loud" and the volume is set to "less than 1" {out of 10} then again it's sort of indicating something's not optimal with the system, at least according to your tastes if nothing else). I dunno maybe I'm not making any sense here.

Anyhow so I was sort of thinking that my next step might be to dial it up to about 5%-10% but only running it at night. The nice thing is that to do that all I need to do is throw a timer on the feed pump.

I'm thinking that the situation is probably indicative of not having as high of a draw on calcium than I was expecting. I guess this is true, I peg my clams as probably the hungriest consumers of Ca and Alk. I don't have any SPS anymore, they just don't live for me (in the last year the longest I've had an SPS frag live for me is about 2 weeks. Actually, I guess that's not true, I did buy an abrotinoides that was hanging on after 4 weeks but it was trying to recede on me so I've asked a friend to house it for me until such time as I can just tear down this tank and move all my livestock into the new system).

Hmm, I was using both a calcium reactor with ZeoMag and dripping kalk at night and got somewhat different results, with calcium way up and alk much lower.

I use TM pro salt and find alk levels much lower after mix in the 7-8 range with decent Mg and Cal levels (1250-1300 Mg and 380-400 Ca),by running Ca reactor at pH 6.6 and drip rate of 60ml/min, and dripping kalk at night was getting results of Ca at 480 and Mg at about 1350-1400 with dKH at 9.8-10.2

The load on system is heavy to overloaded i cant figure out the high Ca numbers and i haven't added any Ca liquid in many months, I recently shut down kalk drip fearing to high Ca may cause problems anyone have any ideas on too high Ca levels?