dosing Q

[acro_man777]

ok i need some advice in this particular situation.....

Im gonna be dosing kalk for my small frag tank, im making my own kalk reactor/stirrer and ive got all the parts including a small vac pump/electronic timer to start dosing.

Now i need to know what kind of drip rate should i do if im losing around 2/5 of a gallon a day in evaporation, and my calcium readings are about 340ppm. I want to get it up to 400-420ppm.

so what kind of drip rate should i be doing, a constant small one? or a timed rate in a faster drip?

 

[acro_man777]

ok ive started to dial in my drip rate with the pump im using. ive connected a 1/4" drip connector to the outlet tube. i picked it up in the sprinkler department in home depot

with about 3ft of vertical tubiing connecting to the outlet of the pump ive established and tested that i can drip about 2/5 of a gallon in about 2 hours. this rate IMO is too fast to drip kalk considering the volume of my tank. so...

im gonna put the pump on one of those cheap mechanical timers from petco. the type that u push in the notches when u want something to turn on. and from what i can count there is about 120 notches. this means that in a 24h time frame each notch is about 12 mins.

so since it takes 2 hours to fill 2/5 of a gallon into my tank w/ my drip system im gonna setup 10 12m notches to go on during a day. i can either spread the intervals out evenly throughout the day or set up the intervals to only go on when the lights are off.

does this sound like a reliable way of dosing kalk? im gonna do multiple tests to figure out how much calcium is being used up during the time so i can have a stable calc/alk/ph throughout the day.

 

[acro_man777]

::bump::

anyone agree or disagree w/ this method?

 

[acro_man777]

ok starting the testing.

just tested the water after i did a water change yesturday.
ph: 8.1
calc: 370 ppm
alk: 7.2 dkh / 2.57 meq/l