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Dosing Calcium and Alk - sanity check.

neuro

Webmaster
Hi all,

I've already read: http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2002/11/chemistry

Ever since the crash, my calcium has been at 320 ppm no matter what day of the week, and my Alk at a super high 11 dKH and slightly increasing. I've stopped dosing Alk temporarily until it comes back down when I start upping calcium.

I'm only dosing about 45 seconds worth of Calcium, but I think I need to change this. If anyone can give me a sanity check, I'd appreciate it:

- 70 gallons total system volume
- currently at 320 ppm
- Want to dose up to 420 ppm
- Using BRS 1.1 mL, dosing begins every hour

BRS calculator for 2 part says in order for me to get to 420 ppm, I need a total of 716.4 mL

I want to split this over a week's worth.
So if I'm dosing every hour for a week:

- That's 24 hrs * 7 days =168 dosing sessions
- 716.4 mL / 168 sessions = 4.26 mL needed per dosing session
- 4.26 mL / 1.1 mL/min = 3.88 minutes

Does 3.88 minutes seem too much for dosing Calc?
Is it OK to stop dosing Alk until things line up?

I will be testing every day or so until things stabilize.

thanks in advance!
 
You might want to increase Calcium slowly until Alk drops.
You slightly risk a precipitation snowstorm if you are not careful.
But more likely, it may precipitate as you dose it, and Calcium may not move much.

Calculations seem about right - it takes a lot.
 
perhaps this is not a solution to your problem Alfred but I would have stopped dosing and done 10 gal water changes every few days till the parameters balanced out and then began dosing again, just so that a baseline is established allowing for the numbers to make sense and be more predictable...
 
You might want to increase Calcium slowly until Alk drops.
You slightly risk a precipitation snowstorm if you are not careful.
But more likely, it may precipitate as you dose it, and Calcium may not move much.

Calculations seem about right - it takes a lot.

Thanks, "it takes a lot" was what I was looking for. Since I've never actually tried dosing past 1 minute before. I'll monitor both over the next few days to make sure it goes slowly.

perhaps this is not a solution to your problem Alfred but I would have stopped dosing and done 10 gal water changes every few days till the parameters balanced out and then began dosing again, just so that a baseline is established allowing for the numbers to make sense and be more predictable...

good point. i'll do this if I can't get things ironed out or if i can't see changes in in alk/calc by the end of the week.
 
I had that problem when I was dosing 2 part, my calcium was through the roof but PH & ALK very low, dosing wasn't really doing anything other than make my test results swing in both directions.

I stopped dosing completely & started doing water changes religiously, after a couple of weeks my PH & ALK were back in check then I switched to strictly kalkwasser thinking that if I need to I can supplement calcium later and because PH & ALK were my only concerns. It's a year later now and I've been dosing the same amount of kalkwasser every day, parameters across the board are absolutely solid, no swings but calcium is still very high which doesn't bother me much.
 
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