I went through the “stages of grief” and wound up at “acceptance”. CO2 is the problem. I went through Randy’s guides to pH to disprove CO2 influence. I made this post showing a lot of steps of diagnosing the problem.
Though I don’t have to “accept” that I have to live with it. What I did to cure my pH issue.
Scaling this up for the future — I have plans on getting a much larger tank. This was my test tank, getting me back in after my 12 year hiatus from the hobby.
So equipment would need to scale with it to get these results. It’s crude, but i would like to say I can use a ratio to help put me in a ball park when building a tank that’s 6x the size of this one.
One consideration is that I use DIY All For Reef. I am sure when I go larger I will switch to a sodium carbonate solution for alkalinity, which I expect will not negatively effect the performance I’ve seen thus far.
Though I don’t have to “accept” that I have to live with it. What I did to cure my pH issue.
- Critical — Get an oversized skimmer, run the airline outside. I originally had a Deltec MCE300 skimmer, which I upgraded to a Deltec MCE601 skimmer. As far as hang on the back skimmers go, Deltec likely produces the fairest rated HOB skimmers. My tank is 28 gallons, and the MCE601 is rated for a 120 gallon. Drawing 400 liters per hour of air. Results — it brought my average up from 8.0 to 8.12 and reduced my diurnal swing to 0.19. Nice high evening pH’s in the 8.2’s.
- Giving CO2 Scrubber Another Chance — The big reason why these don’t work is that they are set up wrong. 1) You still should pull your outside air through the CO2 scrubber 2) the recirculating method isn’t very helpful, though I am still evaluating this. For now it’s just straight through 3) and most importantly the air draw has to be strong enough to make a difference. I proved this in a small volume running a air pump into 600 mL of water. The pH shot through the roof. Upgrading the skimmer with a larger air draw vastly improved the performance. This added another 0.12 to the average pH, now sitting at 8.24. I am hitting my average pH value now at 9 AM!!!! Nice high pH values around 8.30 at end of day.
- Bigger skimmers can be run half the time — I have my skimmer set to turn off (Apex) when the pH hits 8.26. So around 10 AM my skimmer naturally shuts off. Then turns on around 9:30 PM. The skimmer remains on until my lights start influencing the pH in the morning. The lowest values at night are now 8.16, which quickly move up to 8.2 by 8 AM when more of my white LED’s turn on. Results — far more stable pH with a 0.15 diurnal swing
Scaling this up for the future — I have plans on getting a much larger tank. This was my test tank, getting me back in after my 12 year hiatus from the hobby.
So equipment would need to scale with it to get these results. It’s crude, but i would like to say I can use a ratio to help put me in a ball park when building a tank that’s 6x the size of this one.
One consideration is that I use DIY All For Reef. I am sure when I go larger I will switch to a sodium carbonate solution for alkalinity, which I expect will not negatively effect the performance I’ve seen thus far.