Dosing Sodium Silicate solution with doser?

Exus · Dec 13, 2024

Dosing silicate through doser. I have a 2 week trip coming up for the holidays, and I was thinking about putting silicates on my doser. My plan is to dilute a month's worth of sodium silicate 40% solution (1.6ml daily, so 48ml for 30 days) into 1000ml of rodi water and have it split dose 24 times a day. Is there any concern of the sodium silicate separating overtime? I heard it is pretty corrosive, did I dilute it enough? Any feedback would be great!

I got help through "Mack's reef...Dinoflagellates support group!", and know that the dino variety I have can be treated through silicates and diatoms. According to their chart, I am to dose 1.6ml of sodium silicate 40% solution daily for my 120gal tank. Their document warned that directly dosing sodium silicate will result in immediate precipitation, so I've been diluting the 1.6ml with 250ml of rodi water before pouring it into my tank daily.

taricha · Dec 14, 2024

I can't see any issues with that. If you use doser setup that could handle kalk, it should handle silicate solution. Si is very soluble and is going to stay in dosing water pretty well.

long-term, eventually your Si consumption will drop off. So don't leave it on a doser forever. But that's not much of a concern in 2 week stretch.

(also, just general advice - don't change tank automation the day or two before you go out of town - makes it so that you are not likely to catch your errors until it's too late.)

rishma · Dec 14, 2024

taricha said:
(also, just general advice - don't change tank automation the day or two before you go out of town - makes it so that you are not likely to catch your errors until it's too late.)

This is excellent advice. I’d actually say don’t change anything at all for few days before you leave…ask me how I know