A Two Part Equilibrium?

I've been dosing for about three months using peristaltic pumps. I dose 18ml per day of each on my 57g containing SPS and LPS. I know growth accelerates with alkalinity increase, but not with calcium. What I'm wondering though, is how much it accelerates and does that create a stable equilibrium. If, for instance, I start upping the dose, will my numbers quickly go out of whack, or will the increased growth consume the added two part and cause me to have to increase appreciably to get a noticeable result?

 

Since there doesn't seem to be much out there on the nature of the equilibrium, I'm running a little, very unscientific "experiment" using my hanna alk meter. I'll try to track the increase in dosing vs. the alkalinity before lights up each morning and see just how stable it is. We'll start with the first day. Given the very scant results so far, it is silly to draw any conclusion, but would say the change in alkalinity is less than I would have expected.

Dose....Alkalinity

17.6 ml 157 ppm
19.8 ml 158 ppm
22.5 ml 162 ppm
26.4 ml no result yet

 

subscribed, neat thread.

I auto dose my 55 that's a mixed reef too. Honestly, I haven't measured how much I'm dosing in a couple years but I'm thinking it's roughly similar to yours. I can adjust it via "seconds". I can add or remove seconds and thereby control the dosage amount.

If I lower or raise it by 1 second, over the course of a month (how often I test) the alk (or Ca for that matter) will go up or down as one might expect.

Historically, I kept a rather high dKH. Around 12. But I found it was very hard to keep stable. So about a year ago I gradually lowered it to 8.6 (over the course of about 9 months actually looking at my log).

I did this by sometimes skipping a day of dosing (pulled the tube). The 'time' the auto-doser ran though never changed.

If any of that is helpful to you, awesome.

I'll follow your results here.

 

I'm also in the greater houston area by the way. North side.

 

Actually some of that is very useful. I'll keep it in mind as this progresses. On a slightly different note, what are your favorite lfs's on the north side?

 

I'll send a PM.

 

New result up. In spite of a large increase in dose, alkalinity is still, just barely, insi the margin of error. I've made a fairly large increase for tomorrow.