Sweet Reef Corals
SweetReefOH on IG
I don’t normally post on general “finds” or “discoveries” in this hobby but after spending a couple weeks with my new Kh Guardian and my Apex DOS I found some interesting anecdotal evidence regarding Alk consumption and I just wanted to throw it out here.
First, I just want to say I am an avid tester. I have far too much invested, not to know exactly where my system is on a daily basis. I dose BRS Soda Ash solution. I tested Alk with my Hanna checker every day and sometimes multiple times a day if needed. If something seemed off, I’d pull out my Red Sea OG drop test kit.
So when I first got my Apex DOS, I used my Hannah alk tester every hour for most of the day to get a baseline of when and how much I needed to dose. So I set my DOS schedule accordingly with 3 time blocks like this...
I blacked out how much two part I’m dosing because I didn’t want it to distract from the schedule. What I will say, is that I kept each block dosing the same total amount of two part. So when I got to 30mL/day two part Alk, it was 10mL, 10mL, 10mL in the time blocks.
That worked great for a couple years but I was looking for a tester that would keep me up to the hour on my Alk, as well as dose to make corrections. I wanted 24hr, precise stability for my SPS. A couple of months ago I purchased the Kh Guardian Pro to achieve this. After a couple of months of tweaking, I have finally established an awesome level of Alk stability on my system. Below you will see the Guardian read out of each Alk test time and Alk reading (all the way to the right) for the last few days.
My set alkalinity is 8.9. If the guardian tests the Alk below that, it will dose a separate Sodium Bi-Carbonate solution in an amount calculated in the guardian with respect to your system volume. You can also cap that amount, which I have done at 5mL, if you aren’t comfortable with the dosing. I started at 1mL and have slowly worked my way up to trust it to dose up to 5mL per test. This number is the next number to the left of the Alk result. Notice how amazingly stable the Alk has been over the last couple days.
So all of that brings me to what I expected and what I was surprised to learn. I really suspected that my guardian was going to find my DOS schedule perfect because I changed the time dosing length instead of the amount dosed in each block to keep things simpler down the road. So the overnight block is 9hrs 45minutes. Which is much longer than the other two blocks because you would expect consumption to be low overnight. So, if you’re like me, I know I expected to see the consumption go up significantly once my lights came completely on at 10:30am and go off at 6pm. Believe it or not, that is not how it panned out. Below is my actual DOS alk dosing schedule as of today, after all the tweeking....
The consumption actually increased roughly 21% AFTER the lights went out!! I don’t know about you guys, but I was really stunned to stumble upon this and just wanted to share! Comments welcomed and encouraged!
First, I just want to say I am an avid tester. I have far too much invested, not to know exactly where my system is on a daily basis. I dose BRS Soda Ash solution. I tested Alk with my Hanna checker every day and sometimes multiple times a day if needed. If something seemed off, I’d pull out my Red Sea OG drop test kit.
So when I first got my Apex DOS, I used my Hannah alk tester every hour for most of the day to get a baseline of when and how much I needed to dose. So I set my DOS schedule accordingly with 3 time blocks like this...
I blacked out how much two part I’m dosing because I didn’t want it to distract from the schedule. What I will say, is that I kept each block dosing the same total amount of two part. So when I got to 30mL/day two part Alk, it was 10mL, 10mL, 10mL in the time blocks.
That worked great for a couple years but I was looking for a tester that would keep me up to the hour on my Alk, as well as dose to make corrections. I wanted 24hr, precise stability for my SPS. A couple of months ago I purchased the Kh Guardian Pro to achieve this. After a couple of months of tweaking, I have finally established an awesome level of Alk stability on my system. Below you will see the Guardian read out of each Alk test time and Alk reading (all the way to the right) for the last few days.
My set alkalinity is 8.9. If the guardian tests the Alk below that, it will dose a separate Sodium Bi-Carbonate solution in an amount calculated in the guardian with respect to your system volume. You can also cap that amount, which I have done at 5mL, if you aren’t comfortable with the dosing. I started at 1mL and have slowly worked my way up to trust it to dose up to 5mL per test. This number is the next number to the left of the Alk result. Notice how amazingly stable the Alk has been over the last couple days.
So all of that brings me to what I expected and what I was surprised to learn. I really suspected that my guardian was going to find my DOS schedule perfect because I changed the time dosing length instead of the amount dosed in each block to keep things simpler down the road. So the overnight block is 9hrs 45minutes. Which is much longer than the other two blocks because you would expect consumption to be low overnight. So, if you’re like me, I know I expected to see the consumption go up significantly once my lights came completely on at 10:30am and go off at 6pm. Believe it or not, that is not how it panned out. Below is my actual DOS alk dosing schedule as of today, after all the tweeking....
The consumption actually increased roughly 21% AFTER the lights went out!! I don’t know about you guys, but I was really stunned to stumble upon this and just wanted to share! Comments welcomed and encouraged!
