Thinking of switching to Kalk

After reading the thread about Kalk, I'm thinking about starting to use it. Right now I'm using 2 part B-Ionic, which maintains my calcium level very nicely. I recently bought Mrs. Wage's Pickling Lime, but my question is...how much do I use to maintain my calcium....any suggestions?

 

There are a couple ways to do that. I , personally, have a reactor (just got it, previously I used the Kent drip dosing bottle )

With the reactor, it is in line with my topoff setup and all topoff water is now Kalkwasser. It is not too much that I have found yet. I am still playing around with my chemistry. You just put a whole mess of powder in there, and it has a pump which stirs it up several times per day.

With the drip bottle, I put two teaspoons per gallon of ro/di water and would drip half a gallon per night (I had the smaller dosing bottle). It was not quite enough to keep up with my calcium.

The last way that I know of, and I have done this as well, is to mix a kalk slurry. (per recommendation of Mr. Calfo). Start with 1/16th teaspoon of kalk, mix with a little bit of ro/di water to make a paste or slurry and put it directly into the sump. So long as it does not raise your pH mor that .2 points, you may increase the amount of kalk used. He recommended no more that a .2 pH increase per dose so as not to shock the animals. If you need more in a day, wait a while and do this again a few hours later till you get the numbers where you need them.

Additionally, he recommended, to find the amount of CA your tank uses per day, to take your CA measurement, wait 24 hours without dosing anything,and measure the CA again, same time next day. You may want to do this a couple different times to get a most accurate measure, but whatever the decrease in CA, is what your tank uses per day.

I am not exactly sure how you translate that number into Kalk measurement, but Let me see if I can find it. ;D

 

me i went to the dollor store and bought a gallon food container and mix up two teaspoons of kalkwasser in with ro/di water and let it drip into my wet/dry over night works great for me heres a link to the drip system i use
http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-06/nftt/index.php

 

Nice! ;D

 

I just started supplementing my 2 part B-Ionic with Kalkwasser by Warner Marine. Just a teaspoon in a half gallon of RO/DI has helped my calcium levels to get back up where I want them. My tank is going on 10 months old now and the coralline is starting to demand more calcium. Somewhere around Christmas I want to add a Derasa Clam so I need the calc to stay between 450 and 500. With just the B-Ionic the calc was hovering around 360 but the alk was good so I did not want to up the dose and mess with a good balance so I decided to slowly start adding the Kalkwasser and keep my eye on the other levels (ph and alk) as I increase it incrementally. So far so good...I get real shaky about changing things when they have been going well.

Drew

 

Thanks for the input everyone....thinking of buying a calcium reactor..... :-/

 

Yeah, Seawillow, you have a pretty large system...
I have friend with the larger setups, they use CA reactor along with a Kalk reactor..best of both worlds ;D

 

Seawillow, let us know what you find for the CA reactor...they seem pricey but I know that they are worth it in the long run. I am looking into building one and will post my success.

BTW, BL, I recently took my Denitrator offline for maintenance and noticed that my Nitrates are staying at 0...I'm thinking that my CPW system in my plenum is doing better than I had imagined. I remove about a pint of water out from under the plenum every other day and the Nitrates are staying down without the CD.

I hope it stays this way!!

Drew

 

Kewl!

 

I'd get a Kalk reactor prior to getting a calcium reactor. I've found little need to throw extra co2 into my system as my needs are pretty much kept up by dripping kalk 24/7. Just my humle opinion though

I love my Cole Parmer Masterflex doser