Alkalinity slowly creeping up despite no dosing?...

[anthonymckay]

Over the weekend I completed the transfer into my new waterbox 230. After I got my alkatronic set I resumed testing alkalinity on the new tank and monitored the results over the last few days. I assumed my alk uptake would stall quite a bit in the short term from the corals acclimating. But I was a bit surprised and confused to notice that my Alk has slowly been going up over the last few days since I got everything setup. This is despite my kalk reactor dosing pump not running this entire time. How can this be? My only theory is that during feeding when the return pump is off, and the water level rises in the sump, it's touching the end of the line from my kalk reactor and some dried kalk residue is dissolving into the water?

How can I slowly bring my alkalinity back down? I think this evening I'm going to do a 20% water change which should bring it down a touch (Red Sea blue bucket).

 

[Troylee]

Nitrates change? As they go down the alk rises

 

[anthonymckay]

Nitrates change? As they go down the alk rises

My nitrates are quite a bit lower in the new tank simply due to the amount of additional new water (~50gal of old tank water diluted with another 130 gals of new water). They were ~8.5ppm after I did the transfer and added all my old water this weekend. I'll test them again today and see if they've gone down from there.