Help could seachem reef salt be my problem

What Your Grandmother Never Told You About Lime by Randy Holmes-Farley - Reefkeeping.com

I dont believe your wrong Craigar

the main limitation with Kalkwasser or limewater as a form of supplementing calcium and alkalinity is that your evaporation rate may not be high enough to facilitate getting enough of these ions into the solution quickly enough

Kalwasser - you can only dissolve 2 teaspoons per gallon of water - anything more than that just falls out of solution (you can add 45 mils of vinegar and get almost 3 teaspoons and thus more concentrated solution)

Randy's article above, tells you much more about it

Steve

 

What would you think Steve? I'm not saying use it as my only method but as a buffer to keep things stabill. My tank evaporates about ten-15 gallons a week so i think it may be cheaper than constantly dumping money into chemicals to dose ya know!! What would you do in my situation?

 

I would certainly consider giving Kalwasser an opportunity at this stage
you do have some developing SPS and a couple of decent sized colonies
but its not a tank full of SPS colonies or large corals, so Kalkwasser may well be adequate to keep up with demand at this stage in the tanks development

you can get a small tub something like Kalkwasser Pure from Warner Marin for between 10 - 20 bucks depending where you shop
mixed at 2 teaspoons per gallon of water, that tub would last a reasonable amount of time
and as such works out a lot cheaper than the bottled liquid supplements you are using now

important tips on Kalkwasser
when you mix it
you end up with a crust at the top and sediment in the bottom of the container
you need to syphon out the liquid from the mixing container from above this sediment and below the crust (discarding these 2 areas once you have your Kalkwasser solution in a seperate container)

slowly dripping this solution into a high flow area of the sump, helps to avoid localised PH spikes, and also precipitation (falling out of solution due to high concentration of ions in 1 spot)

you will also need to address your magnesium 1st - as again Magnesium acts as a binder for the other ions, helping to keep them in solution - if Mag is low, then you can end up with a balancing act trying to keep the required Calcium and Alkalinity levels where they should be (one goes up, the other comes down scenario)

do some searching on here, and around the www
Many people with mixed reef aquariums, softies, LPS and SPS are able to maintain parameters with Kalkwasser alone

worse case scenario IMO, is that if it does not completely cover the tanks needs
the use of other supplements will at least be reduced
so IMHO , there is a cost saving benefit to be had from trying with this method
even if its good enough on its own, or not

Steve

 

How would u mix it? Would I need to get a reactor or could I get away with another way

 

it may be worthwhile on a 300 gallon system to look at a Kalk reactor or Kalk stirrer

but for mixing, I used a simple 2 litre jug, 1 teaspoon Kalk powder and a wooden spoon

let it stand for a hour or so, and then syphoned off the clearer liquid between the sediment and the crust

adding - see below - a simple and budget method
but again, in a 300 gallon system, the question is "will this keep up with demand?"

A Simple DIY Kalk Dripper by Agu Lukk - Reefkeeping.com

 

With a system your size and the number of hard corals, you will need either a calcium reactor, or two part dosing with pumps. It was probably sneaking up on you for a while and you didn't notice it. I know others made these suggestions, just restating the obvious.