Kalk Reactor W/ATO

[Neptune_Fan]

Following along here,
Say for example I was using an old empty salt 5G bucket as my reservoir.Should I use the cover to keep it from allowing the air in? And would I just drill a hole in the top so that the tubing from the pump can feed through?

 

[bennr]

I am currently using an old salt bucket as my ato.....but I have been using esv 2 part in the bucket along with a mj400 to keep it stirred. My ato is the tunze osmo and the small pump that is included with the osmo kit just sits in the bottom of the bucket along with the mj400. I find this is not working very well because the two part additives settle in the bucket and the circ. pump has to be moved around in order to keep it mixed. Kalk seems like it would be a much better idea.....would I have to keep the water circulating? And would I have to keep my osmo pump off the bottom of bucket if I only used 2tsp of Kalk per gallon of rodi water? Anyone using the deltec stirrer? They look like the best stirrer and my Lfs uses it but they are quite pricey. Any help is appreciated!

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Following along here,
Say for example I was using an old empty salt 5G bucket as my reservoir.Should I use the cover to keep it from allowing the air in? And would I just drill a hole in the top so that the tubing from the pump can feed through?

Yes, you want a lid on it. The flow will be slow enough that replacement air for the pumped can easily get in through the sides of the hole where the tubing went through or if not, drill a tiny hole for air.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I am currently using an old salt bucket as my ato.....but I have been using esv 2 part in the bucket along with a mj400 to keep it stirred. My ato is the tunze osmo and the small pump that is included with the osmo kit just sits in the bottom of the bucket along with the mj400. I find this is not working very well because the two part additives settle in the bucket and the circ. pump has to be moved around in order to keep it mixed. Kalk seems like it would be a much better idea.....would I have to keep the water circulating? And would I have to keep my osmo pump off the bottom of bucket if I only used 2tsp of Kalk per gallon of rodi water? Anyone using the deltec stirrer? They look like the best stirrer and my Lfs uses it but they are quite pricey. Any help is appreciated!

You mean one part of the two part in the bucket? You cannot mix them.

No need to stir a two part, nor the limewater (kalkwasser). There should be little to no solids in a two part if properly mixed and the two parts are not mixed together.

 

[bennr]

@randy
I have been mixing the two parts in my ato bucket because I need to add both parts.......there does seem to be some solids forming in the bottom of bucket.....should I stop mixing the two parts in my ato bucket? What would you suggest? Should I start using Kalk?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Yes, you definitely can never mix them in any way outside of the aquarium. Even diluted with a lot of fresh water is unacceptable. You will precipitate calcium and magnesium carbonates and magnesium hydroxide.

 

[bennr]

@randy
Okay thank you for your expertise. I will discontinue mixing the two in the bucket.....should I start using Kalk in my bucket instead? Just stir it once after each time I add rodi and maybe keep the pump off the bottom a little?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

That's a fine plan, yes, but whether it adds as much as you did with the two part will depend on how much two part you were using.

 

[bennr]

Good point randy. Thank you for your help. My tunze osmo tops up my sump quite often.....I evaporate approx 1 gallon of water every day and I am worried about dosing Kalk in my ato during the day when lights are on because it might raise my ph too high.....right now my ph is 7.8 to 8.1.......I feel like dosing during night hours would help me keep my ph closer to 8 and not allow it to drop as low.....

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I doubt it will raise the pH too high when it is starting out on the low side, but dosing at night is a good idea for many folks. I dose it 24/7.

 

[bennr]

@randy
Ok thanks maybe I will try dosing it 24/7 in my ato with tunze osmo......it should be better than what I am doing now......do you use a calcium reactor or dosers along with Kalk?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I use only limewater. My tank has very little SPS and so the demand is not that high.

 

[erics3000]

Wow great thread. I have not been up to date lately with the reef community. I am going to use my R/O storage Rubbermaid tub instead of my kalk reactor. No more messing with the kalk mixing pump. Now I guess I can use my Kalk Reactor as a modified bio pellet reactor

 

[Johnseye]

Dredging up a few month old thread for a question.

If I keep kalk in my ato reservoir can I use the kalk water to fill my SW reservoir or will there be a problem with adding reef salt mix with kalk water?

I currently use a two tank ato and auto water change rig. Fresh water tank on top gravity feeds a tank on the bottom in which I use a salt mix.

Thanks

 

[droog]

Great thread, I'm trying to figure out the best approach for Kalk with my tank. I have a RedSea 500L all-in-one tank which has a "hidden" ATO reservoir behind the main display tank, that gravity feeds the return chamber of the sump, controlled by a float switch.

I made the mistake of dumping Kalk powder into the ATO reservoir - problem with this setup is that water feeds in from the bottom of the reservoir, so I fed the slurry rather than the clear saturation. Nothing crashed, but not pretty, and there is still some gunk in the bottom several months later.

Plan B was to dump calk into the bottom of a brute trashcan like sk8r's diagram. That kinda worked, but I tend to pump about 30g of water into the reservoir at a time using a large pump. The power of that pump would disturb the sediment so I'm adding cloudy water to the ATO again.

So I switched to a dosing pump and additivies for Ca, Mg and Alk. Which is working well but is very expensive and annoying to but additives. So I would like to go back to Kalkwasser and use the additives only to supplement any shortfall.

I see two options

A] Run my RODI filter into a large pail and dump calk in there. Syphon from pail A -> B and pump the clear solution from B -> ATO reservoir

B] Copy Sk8r's setup and somehow have the pump sit much further up in the pail so that the running pump doesn't disturb the kalk on the bottom

Make sense? Anyone here doing something similar and suggestions which method would work best? How do you rig the pump to sit that high the pail? Looks like a good idea. Maybe I could suspend some eggcrate in there to make a platform?

-droog

 

[bboersma79]

Dredging up a few month old thread for a question.

If I keep kalk in my ato reservoir can I use the kalk water to fill my SW reservoir or will there be a problem with adding reef salt mix with kalk water?

I currently use a two tank ato and auto water change rig. Fresh water tank on top gravity feeds a tank on the bottom in which I use a salt mix.

Thanks

have the same question thought I would bump this thread as it helped me out. do you just add salt to your ato water that already is mixed with kalk (I have 2 brutes the rodi w kalk is gravity fed to swap resevoir?

 

[outy]

do you just add salt to your ato water that already is mixed with kalk (I have 2 brutes the rodi w kalk is gravity fed to swap resevoir?

No.

 

[Dkuhlmann]

So can I add kalk to my rodi top off bucket instead of the pickling lime? Aren't they the same thing?

 

[TNT32D]

I have tried and like the Twolittlefishies method. Use a float switch with a timer and set the time to only come on for 1-2 minutes at a time.

 

[Dkuhlmann]

So can I add kalk to my rodi top off bucket instead of the pickling lime? Aren't they the same thing?