2-part dosing question

[lapoolboy]

Ok, I have consistently low calcium, alkalinity, and pH no matter how many water changes I perform. The tank has been running around 4 years and everything is doing O.K., although not great. No explosive growth or anything. I have softies and LPS - no SPS. I believe I need to get these levels up a little and I will see positive results.

I have purchased two Drew's dosing pumps to automatically dose 2-part solutions. I will connect them to my ReefKeeper Lite system on multiple times throughout the day/night. I believe the common practice is to dose the calcium during the day and the alkalinity at night.

My question is....how do I get started with dosing this stuff and figure out how much my tank needs every 24 hours so I can set up the pump run times and schedule evenly throughout the day/night?

I am using B-Ionic solutions too if that matters.

Thanks for any help to a relative newbie!

 

[redfishblewfish]

You will also want to dose magnesium, but not as frequently or as much.

First test to find out where your alk, calc and mag are.

Use a reef calculator to find out what you need to get your levels were you want them. BRS has a nice reef calculator on their site. Note that you might need to raise these levels slowly over three of four days. Specifically you don't want to raise alk more than 1 dKH per day.

Once you get your levels were you want them, don't dose for three days and then test. Determine what your tank consumes per day and adjust your dosing pumps accordingly.

 

[bertoni]

I would dose by hand for a while, to get a good idea of the tank's consumption rate. Measuring alkalinity and dosing each day at the same time should give you a good trend line fairly quickly. The problem with waiting 3 days to measure is that the growth rate can drop off rapidly as the alkalinity level drops, so the information can be very noisy. For example, my tanks consumed 2-3 dKH per day, so waiting 3 days to measure wouldn't even be close.

 

[lapoolboy]

Thanks guys for the help!

Ok, what I'm going to do tonight is test all three parameters...Cal, Alk, and Mag. Once I have those figures, I can plug them in to the reef calculator on BRS website with my water volume, and it will tell me how much of each to add to get to desired levels.

Do I split all three amounts into several equal dosages, add all three at same time, stagger them, or what? I think I will go ahead and get a Bubble Magus 3-head dosing pump so I can dial in all three to dose automatically. That would work better than three separate Drew's dosing pumps and it would take up less room in the stand too.

Maybe I should report my levels back here tonight and you guys can guide me from there?

I am going to measure the dimensions of the display tank and the sump and calculate how much water it contains. I know there is some water in transit, but that should only be a gallon, if that much. I can just shut the pumps off, let the water equalize and drain down to the sump, and then measure the volumes. I think I can get pretty precise on water volume this way.

 

[bertoni]

If all the numbers are in the acceptable zone, the order of dosing doesn't matter, and you can add the next supplement as soon as the previous one has mixed into the system. For my 29g tanks, that was about 10 seconds. Let us know what the levels are, and we can be a bit more confident about how to proceed.

I would keep the changes to calcium and magnesium to 50 ppm or less, and alkalinity to 1 dKH or so, because getting an accurate water volume can be tricky.