KALK question

[kerry]

I have been making my own KALK (lime water) to top off my tank. The question I have is this, do you need to have the storage container its in tightly sealed. I have a liter bottle I does it from which is vented so it can not be sealed tightly but, does the storage container have to be? I noticed the white stuff on the bottom seemed to accumulate more over a few days it was in a bucket and this was after it all settled in the first couple hours. I was thinking that if this stuff on the bottom is accumulating that it maybe pulling the calcium out of the solutions. I read that CO2 caused this white stuff. Am I right in thinking it should be covered and if its not the concentration of calcium is getting less? Also does anyone know if a high ALK will cause less calcium, my ALK is over 14??!!!

[Ace25]

Yes, Kalk needs to be air tight. If exposed to air, increasingly large amounts of calcium will be precipitated from the kalkwasser over time thereby lowering its potency. I mix 5G of Kalk mix in a old Reef Crystals bucket, type with a screw on lid and rubber gasket. I always fill it to the rim to avoid any air getting inside. When I use it I scoop out what I need (usually about 1/2) then refill the bucket with RO/DI and give it a quick stir to mix it up and immediately put the lid back on.

If your Alk is over 14, stop dosing kalk (or anything else that may raise Alk, like any buffers). That is way to high and will likely lead to severe coral damage/death. Let the Alk levels drop naturally over the next couple weeks to a safe level. If you have to, just dose CA suppliment to keep CA above 360.

[kerry]

So I should be dosing calcium chloride and not calcium hydroxide?

[SantaMonica]

Mine forms a solid layer at the top, which stops further evaporation/transformation.

[Ace25]

Calcium Chloride is what I dose to raise calcium by itself. Calcium Hydroxide is Kalk, which will raise both CA and Alk levels. If your Alk is at 14 now I would only use Calcium Chloride for the next few weeks until your Alk levels drop back down to around 9.

[kerry]

Calcium Chloride is what I dose to raise calcium by itself. Calcium Hydroxide is Kalk, which will raise both CA and Alk levels. If your Alk is at 14 now I would only use Calcium Chloride for the next few weeks until your Alk levels drop back down to around 9.
Thank you Sir.

[kerry]

Does anyone have a product they buy in place of buying the fish type brands. I know the ice melt products are the same but try finding ice melting stuff in Louisiana?? I have found some moisture absorber but it had a couple % of sodium and potassium chloride in it as well. Would that be suitable. For the time I just bought some liquid Kents stuff from the local.

[kerry]

I have found some calcium chloride at my local pool place. Any one have any idea how much to add per gallon? Looks like from what I see on line its about a tea to table spoon. I can always check PPM but a good place to start can save a lot of time.

[kerry]

Here is a nice bit of info this subject of dosing http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2004/4/chemistry .

[Floyd R Turbo]

I personally would only use products made for an aquarium. Too much risk of contamination IMO. It's not like Kalk costs that much anyways considering the cost of a problem in your tank.

[kerry]

I thought that to Floyd (I do not disagree with you at all but, I would like to share my findings. I was even afraid to use the lime water AKA KALK. I happen to hold your advice in very HIGH regard Floyd.), so, I did some investigating. Granted it was not super duper thorough but, this is what I found. Take this place for instance http://www.gettankedaquariums.com/index_file/Calcium.Chloride.File/Bulk.Calcium%20Chloride.Main.Page..htm . They have calcium chloride that is only 94-97% pure. The stuff I got at my local pool supply was only .05% impurity which was labeled as chloride??? I figured it had to be OK. Its so concentrated in the first place that you do not need much. I mixed 1.25 cups to a gallon. Approximately One Liter of this mix raised my 40g Ca a lot, it was around 200PPM increase or so. I didn't get a 100% check on the first test as it was in the area of 150PPM, yes very low. After 1L of Ca mix dripped in it went to 350PPM. I figured most of the time I will be using the KALK and only using the Ca chloride for adjustments when the ALK is to high to dose KALK. Any other experience or data on this would be very appreciated as in the past I have always bought the bottled pre-packaged dosing stuff from the SW supply outlets. So please any input would be great.

[Ace25]

I know many people that use "pool supply" stores or grocery stores to buy kalk and Ca. As long as it is pure calcium hydroxide it is safe to use. After all, it is just a chemical compound, not some secret formula.

For mixing/dosing Calcium Chloride your mix ratio sounds about right. I use the Bulk Reef Supply pouches which contain about 2 cups worth and mix that in with 1G of RO/DI water.

[kerry]

I thought that 1.25 cup was a bit much but this was the only recipe I could find on the net. I added 2G to it to cut it back some. For the KALK I use about two rounded teaspoons per gallon. My ALK is coming down slowly it was about 15-16-ish now its 1350 or so. My Mg is still over 1500 after about 10 days or so.

Thanks to all for the advice on this as its helped me a lot.

I was a water change baby for decades and did them once a week so I never got into the dosing thing since this stuff was in the salt mix. Now with the scrubber the WC's have been eliminated so this dosing deal is a little bit of a learning curve. I am very glad for this opportunity to learn new knowledge on this hobby that I love so much.
I think we need to start a thread about dosing for these folks that are new to not doing water changes. I think this info is very important so others that are accustomed to doing water changes does not get burned by not dosing and loose corals. I was fortunate and only lost one but, I am pretty observant about what goes on in my tanks and seen a problem so I started taking 25% water changes at it daily after the first 60% change but, this was little to late to save my plate coral.

[Ace25]

I wouldn't worry about Mag, 1500 is actually ok. There is a "theory" that has been going around for years that if you keep your Mg above 1500 then hair algae does not grow well in the display. Personally I have never found that to be true, actually would cause issues with an ATS if it were true, but still people keep spreading that one over the years, so if you see someone mention that theory just take it with a huge grain of salt. Normally 1350 would be considered "safe middle ground" for Mg but I have seen people push it to over 2000 without problems, although I wouldn't recommend it.

Alkalinity is the biggest killer of tanks. Calcium and Magnesium levels have swing quite a bit without any issues as long as the swing is within the "safe zone". Unfortunately the same can not be said for Alk. While it also has a large "safe zone", Alk 7-12, if you get large swings that go over 1 full point in 48 hours (like going from 9-10 on Alk), even if it is in the safe zone, it could cause a lot of problems in the tank. Alk is the one you have to be super careful about, which means be super careful with Kalk, especially when first starting out. Your 2 teaspoons per gallon sounds good, just make sure it doesn't go into the tank to quickly. If your using it with ATO water and have a lot of evaporation you may want to "cut" the kalk to 1/2 strength. Easiest way is to mix full strength kalk and then take a scoop of water out of the Kalk water, then 1 scoop out of RO/DI water into your ATO container in order to make the Kalk 50% strength.

[kerry]

I have a DIY 1L dosing device that I let drip no more then a drop per second. This seems to work well. All this dosing advice has been a huge help to me and I am sure others that have read it to.
We need to get a sticky thread going with dosing and testing for folks new to scrubber use and unfamiliar with dosing supplements. The scrubber is a great tool for SW keeping but can be trouble if one is not familiar with dosing supplements if they are use to doing WC's every or every other week. One should be made aware that if they stop water changes then they need to dose to keep certain levels up for their fish and or corals to survive.

[Floyd R Turbo]

I seem to recall that you're not supposed to raise Calcium more than 50 points/day and Magnesium no more than 100. A raise of 200 points in one hours seems like it's way over the top. Just saying...

[Ace25]

Ya, I wouldn't recommend doing more than what you said, it is always best to raise or lower any parameter as slowly as possible in this hobby. But the chances of causing a major problem by accidentally adding 80 CA at once isn't the end of the world if it falls within the safe range... adding 2 points of Alk at once on the other hand can cause serious problems. Adding both at once in large amounts will also lead to serious problems, major precipitates, in turn sucking all the alk and ca out of the water.

I was assuming he was testing on sample water to figure out correct dosage, I hope that wasn't 200 at once on his display.

[kotlec]

Ace , can you please give a list of possible problems (symptoms) caused by alc swings ? I feel like I have something wrong in my tank, just havent figured what it is yet.

[Ace25]

Easiest/most common symptom to see is burnt tips on SPS corals or weak/tearing flesh on some types of LPS. Every tip will be white/dead and the flesh will look like it has been sunburned, all crackly looking.

In most tank crash cases that are not equipment related, it is usually over reaction by the owners to a perceived problem that is the demise of the tank. I just witnessed it over the last month.. a friends tank was crashing, he couldn't find the cause but the he tried to fix the problem he thought he was seeing. Turns out the tests were bad and the controller was faulty, so he was reading low pH and big alk swings and he kept adding alk and buffers to try and control it, only ended up making things 10x worse. He finally figured out his problems but he lost 90% of his corals before that.

One of the best motto's for our hobby I think is "SPS = Stability Promotes Success". The goal is to keep everything as stable as possible, even if something is out of whack. If you react slowly to a bad parameter to get it back into proper levels your corals will love you for it, react quickly thinking you must get a parameter back at a certain level ASAP, then the whole tank will start fighting you and you will never win that battle.

[kotlec]

I have some zoas (not all) and some shrooms(not all) looking really bad. At the same time all sps look good, polyps extracted all the time and nice growth. But this seems not similar to your described symptoms. My Ca is very hard to keep up. Its falling
schockingly fast all the time.

[Ace25]

I would look at other things from what you describe. SPS corals are certainly your first indicator for alk related problems, and if your SPS is fine then I don't believe you have any alk issues.

Zoas.. any chance of pests? Zoa eating nudibranch's.. maybe a fish? Sometimes zoas act like xenia and grow great and then all of the sudden just melt away for no apparent reason. Mushrooms.. flow or light related? They like low of both. Most things will not even think about eating mushrooms so I don't think that would be pest related.

[kerry]

I was assuming he was testing on sample water to figure out correct dosage, I hope that wasn't 200 at once on his display.
It was not at once, it was about 1L at a drop per second, its fish only right now as the corals are in my 10G after the power outage disaster. After I acclimated the corals to my 10G I took a WC of 60% at it, with fish still in there and they hung on just great, so I figured they could take a good swing of Ca. Granted, I did not expect it to be but about 100 max according the recipe I found online. I should have taken the time to cut down a sample to a readable percentage for a test with the kit first as my specs where not that accurate. It was just calcium chloride so the Alk stayed the same. It could have been a mistake for sure if the corals where in there. I was not very proud of my mistake but I figured I would post it so someone else would not make the same mistake.

[Ace25]

Since you have no corals and you learned something out of it without harming anything then I would say it was a good test to run. :)

[kotlec]

I spent many hours looking for pests already :(

Interestingly green color zoas are bad and green color mushrooms are bad. And both of purple color thrive.

[kerry]

I sure thought it was going to be bad. I am glad it was not. It all turned out good. I gained a lot of knowledge so it was a win.

[kotlec]

Kerry,
must say sorry for flooding

[kerry]

Sorry for flooding? I guess I do not understand Sir. Are you talking about asking questions on this forum/post. If thats the case you need to jump in anytime you have a question!!! Thats what this place is for, its to gain knowledge! Pop in anytime you feel there is a question you need answered.

[kotlec]

:D nice, thanks. Im really happy I am here.