When to add calcium reactor?

First let me lay out a few details. I do plan on having both soft and hard corals in the tank at some point. I don't plan on any form of dosing. The tank is pretty close to the end of it's cycle (LFS estimates a week to two weeks tops based on last water test).

So my question is, when should I plan on having a calcium reactor in the system? I'm going to guess that I'll start with a couple of easy fish (clowns most likely) and maybe one or two easy corals (tbd, open to suggestions).

 

Dosing

Never heard of not dosing a tank before. IMO i would run everything you have now instead of later. IMO

 

Well right now would be as good a time as any it takes several weeks to dial them in properly and get them stabilized . Then once thats done as needed you can adjust it up to keep up with the demand as the corals grow. And as for softs and hard corals being mixed ? by hard if you mean SPS ? then not a great idea one or the other will suffer once the proper lean levels of one or the other species is reached , Now if by hard you mean LPS corals then they can mixed better in a community with soft corals over SPS corals.

I have one LPS now in this tank with all SPS corals and the water flows are just killing it all of the heads are about beat off of the skeleton of the frog spawn . So it most likely will totally die out sooner or later .. No place to move it to either as there are major flows all over the entire tank.. I'm pushing about 8 to 9,000GPH internal flows in a 90 gal now. And under these types of flow rates then no soft corals at all would stand a snowballs chance in Hades

 

This is great information, thanks. Your tank size is pretty close to mine (I have a 93 gallon). So you're saying that I would have better luck sticking with either lps or sps, but mixing them might be an issue (I'm really new to this stuff)?

Also, your recommendation on the calcium reactor makes sense to me. I don't really want to spend the money now, but if I'm going to be doing it why not do it now and get it dialed in. Thanks for the help!

 

I like them there are a few guys here to got their reactors from me and when I shipped them it was totally plug and play and all said it was so simple and they had worried about how complicated it would be based on all the stories they had heard . But I dose nothing .. The CO2 dissolves the aragonite and that contains every element you would need , I have been dialing mine back this last few weeks Its down to 20 bubble per min and about a drop per second of the effluent from reactor , On the other tank a 180 this reactor used about 1 20lb bottle of Gas and about 8.00 worth of reactor media a year . the gas was 30.00 so you can see its a lot cheaper and once set it just does it all by itself

I keep SPS corals are they are very unforgiving with water parameters so the reactor keeps them rock solid ..

You will have no problems with LPS corals like the Frog Spawns Hammers bubble open brains and such along with the softs like leathers colts and that type of coral But the SPS requires such strong water currents that it wil beat the softs and LPS to death.

 

Scott, you can run a reactor now if you want to and waste a lot of money or, you can skip the reactor, save yourself a ton of money. You can't dial a reactor in if there is no Ca load on the tank other than to shut it off. You have no need for the extra calcium so you shut it down. If you are adding Ca, then you are using media, CO2, and the electricity to run it. If there is no Ca load on the tank, then you are simply elevating the Ca level. One of two things will happen when you do that. First, you simply pull the Ca out with weekly water changes, thus wasting the Ca. Why put it in there if you don't need it? The second thing, and worse, is that you Ca/Mg/Alk get way out of whack, Ca starts precipitating out, you get snowstorms in the tank.

The only thing that can come of running a Ca reactor on a tank with no Ca demand is bad news.

 

Ok, fair enough. But, my LFS is telling me even when I start putting crabs, shrimp, snails and stuff like that in I'll need a way to control calcium. Is this accurate, or not?

 

Crabs, Shrimps and Snails don't use Calcium so why would you need to add it? What little bit they may use for shells and such you would be replacing with water changes. There simply is no reason to run a Ca reactor unless you have a strong Calcium demand and you won't. The only thing running one now would do is waste a lot of money