Kalk is low cost, keeps Alkalinity & Calcium in check and helps PH. Do you use it?

[Shooter6]

Never clean any hoses. Hoses dont have residue. You just add ro/Di water to container. leave old kalk in the container add a little more Takes 2-3 minutes. Certain that cleaning

never add Mag tested last week and it was 1520
that kalk reactor takes much longer.

Actually lines do build up residue, just like containers and pumps.

 

[Shooter6]

Absolutely.

With that said, I find Tropic Marin all-for-reef depletes my nutrients at times too quickly (it's a form of bacterial dosing), doesn't raise pH like kalkwasser, and is quite costly. BUT... it works!

Kalk will bind phosphate and remove it from the water.

 

[Calm Blue Ocean]

We started off the DIY way with a 2 gallon bucket and a hole drilled in the side. Lol. Ran a gravity fed tube above the line where the precipitate would settle in the bottom. Then opened up the line slowly and dripped. It helped with my comfort level before I hooked it up to a pump.

Thanks for the idea! I think my tank is at the stage where it could really benefit from something like kalk and this sounds like a possible way to ease into it.

 

[Digitalfirex]

Ok guys, very interesting topic. I'm a new reefer... so it's still "learning" for me. I have a reefer 250 and was planning on dosing ab+ , live phyto (manual dosing) and all for Reef. Would I have a down side to this plan? Is there a better option?

 

[1ocean]

You should consider dosing it instead of putting in the ato. If you're dosing 2 part, then you could easily replace it with 1 solution and use another head for ab+ or amino acids or whatever you'd like. Instead of putting it in your ato, put a saturated solution in a container of your choosing and dose it from there. It's like having 2 ato containers, but one takes out an exact amount every day based on your corals usage. Pretty nifty imo.

I am using a single stand alone Ecotech doser to dose Kalkwasser. My plan after talking to others who are doing this they then dose if/ when needed 2 part but since Kalkwasser is the foundation they dose less 2 part.

 

[Oregon Grown Reef]

A simple doser and manual mix. No need to buy a $300 stirrer

This! Why are people spending a stupid amount of money on something when it can literally be as cheap as $5 for a bucket (or a free bucket with every purchase of Instant Ocean) and $90 for a wifi controllable dosing pump like the kamoer X1 pro? It could be cheaper if you didn't care about the wifi controllability. Kalk costs so little and lasts so long that you can't even really factor it in as an expense. I use a spatula to stir up my kalk.

 

[Oregon Grown Reef]

Ok guys, very interesting topic. I'm a new reefer... so it's still "learning" for me. I have a reefer 250 and was planning on dosing ab+ , live phyto (manual dosing) and all for Reef. Would I have a down side to this plan? Is there a better option?

There's no downside to this. But better options? Depends. What is your tanks average pH? If it's low, then kalkwasser is a super easy and cheap method of dosing and also raising pH. 2 part is also doable, but for me there's an unnecessary amount of complication with it since you have to worry about rising salinity over time. In my opinion, kalkwasser should be a new reefers first go to dosing method as it doesn't get much easier and the benefits are awesome. If you can fog a mirror, you can figure out how to dose kalk. I did.

 

[Seascapes]

I use 2 part on 1 tank and kalk on another. I've been thinking about switching to kalk on the other tank because it's so easy. The corals are doing better and my alk has never been more stable.

Reasons I'll probably use it on every tank I'll ever have:

1. You don't need to worry about one of the dosers not dosing at the same rate as the other, eventually causing a drift.

2. My auto top off bucket lasts forever now because a good chunk of the evaporation is being dealt with from the kalk.

3. I dose saturated kalkwasser because it's the best way to do it. You don't have to worry about varying evaporation rates and subsequently varying alk/calcium readings. Nor do you worry about not being able to switch dosing amounts because the amount you'd need to dose is higher than your evaporation because it's not saturated.

4. It also doesn't increase your salinity like conventional 2 part does,K so there's no need to remove saltwater and replace it with freshwater; therefore, you don't need to worry about lowering every element in your tank or dosing something like Tropic Marin's Trace A- and K+.

5. Kalkwasser also removes phosphates because it precipitates out as calcium phosphate, which isn't biologically available for algae.

6. It can also be used in conjunction with every dosing method and still retain all of it's benefits. Because there is a limit to how much you can dose (although that limit is higher than one would think), you don't have to worry about replacing it with something, but in conjunction with it.

7. In that same spirit, kalkwasser can also be combined with vinegar to increase its potency, so you can continue to use it as demand gets higher. This also has a slight carbon dosing effect, which should be monitored if you're running a low nutrient tank. You're likely already monitoring if you have a low nutrient tank anyways, so it's no extra work.







Oh, and it increases pH.

Interesting, thank you for the information. I'm dosing 2 part and my CA stays high, so I'm only dosing ALK and MAG. My MAG drops to 1350 all the time and I can't seem to get the ALK to stabilize. Needless to say all my SPS is brown. I'm not adding SPS now until this is figured out. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[cryptodendrum]

If people put as much expense and planning into a true kalkwasser dosing setup as they do 2 part I think it would be received a little differently. Running on an ato stresses pumps out and is unstable. Requires too frequent of effort. If a quality peristaltic doser and kalk reactor were used to dose specific amounts based on need, separate of the ATO, you can get quite far with Kalkwasser alone. Only fairly full sps dominant tanks would need to supplement further.

Or a large fast growing LPS system.

 

[cryptodendrum]

Following up on my first comment on how my Hybrid Kalkwasser Baling Lite setup works, I thought I'd include a few more photos of my continuous feed Kalkwasser setup.

This sits underneath my fishroom sink. I've got the kalkwasser reactor sitting in a 50L Rubbermaid tub, just to catch any type of overflow / leak / toilet valve / disconnected hose problem (in 15+ years, it's happened once, and it kept kalk from touching the floor.)

Tap water comes in via the grey hose on the backside and connects to the toilet valve though the side of the bucket. The green hose is the extraction hose and leads to the 2nd stage sediment collection bottle, before being sucked through the pump itself. This way, there's always negative pressure on the majority of the Kalkwasser feed hose up until the pump.

I didn't skimp on the Toilet valve - I went to a plumbing shop that services commercial professional plumbers and laid out a full 15 euros for a good one, instead of one of the cheaper 6 euro units, which lasts me at least 5-8 years, which is a pretty good life expectancy I think considering the harsh conditions it's in.

The Reactor Riser bottle is a 2 liter cola bottle with the bottom cut off. The bottom is cut off in a zig-zag fashion & several large holes made into the side towards the very bottom of the bottle to allow large undissolved slurry of Kalk to pass through easily. The bottle has a loosely bound Zip-Tie attaching it to the heavy Eheim pump to hold it in place when the pump comes on, but also facilitates easy removal for annual cleaning.

The Eheim pump is something like a 2500lph pump (forgot the exact rate) which seems like overkill, but it only fires for just a few seconds each day. 5 seconds is just long enough to kick all the kalk slurry up on the bottom, and not disturb the top crust on the surface of the water too much. The other advantage to using such a powerful pump like this is, it never clogs and never really requires cleaning. I find very little build up or blockages of it during my annual reactor clean out & rebuild. It's very reliable & is the same pump that has been in there for at least 10 years now.

BTW, the plastic PEP Cola bottles break down (become brittle) after about 3-4 years and have to be replaced. Usually, it's right around the cap that cracks first as that is exposed to negative pressure and thus breaks the siphon from the pump.

This is the second stage sediment collection filter bottle. This is the accumulation of slurry / sediment after one year, which isn't a lot, but helps ensure that the kalkwasser that gets dosed to my tank is pure clear dissolved kalkwasser. Kalkwasser from the reactor comes in via the green downtube and exits via a very short 2-3cm extension just under the top cap via a siphon from the pump. The run to the pump is about 2 meters and from the pump, half a meter to my sump.

Lastly, these are my 3 display tanks. The fishroom also contains some tanks, but they're my "working tanks" (frags, growout, clownfish breeding, etc.), not meant for display. The big tank is 1000L and 2.5 meters long; and the total volume of the DTs is right at 1450L, with the other 1000L coming from the tanks and infra in the fishroom. The 4x pipes from these DTs which goes under the floor to a room on the otherside of the house to the fishroom holds approx 200L alone.

I have approx a dozen pretty significantly sized mother colonies of Softies, LPS corals, and a few SPS, which all grow pretty rapidly. (It's just me, I prefer corals that move and sway more than SPS) I harvest about half of everything you see here every 6-12 months and sell it to some local fish stores to offset my operating costs & bring more sustainability to our hobby.

The Monti's suck huge amounts of ALK and without my continuous feed Kalkwasser setup I'd be remixing 5L of Alk supplement every 5 days, but with Kalkwasser, it's more like every 20-30 days.

Cost wise, a 5Kg container of Alk Carbonate powder costs me approx 35 euros, where 500grams of Kalkwasser powder that lasts for 3 months costs me about 10 euros. So it's easy to see how that adds up over a year of cost savings.

Kalkwasser is the way to go, even if one has to use additional supplementation to "top up" any gaps Kalkwasser can't achieve.

 

[cryptodendrum]

Kalk will bind phosphate and remove it from the water.

And many other impurities as well.

 

[mclark452]

Kalk is NOT the only one part solution to add both Ca and alk. TM's Carbocalcium adds both as well but has little to no effect on pH.

 

[cryptodendrum]

That makes sense. What could you do in the unusual scenario (that I have) where my alkalinity and calcium demands are not proportional, I.E. I'm having to dose quite a bit more alkalinity than calcium in my tank...really always have

Same here, my Alkalinity is consumed about 2-4 times faster than CA. See my two comments which provides overviews of how I constructed / operate a Hybrid Kalkwasser Baling Lite setup.

 

[Bpb]

Following up on my first comment on how my Hybrid Kalkwasser Baling Lite setup works, I thought I'd include a few more photos of my continuous feed Kalkwasser setup.

This sits underneath my fishroom sink. I've got the kalkwasser reactor sitting in a 50L Rubbermaid tub, just to catch any type of overflow / leak / toilet valve / disconnected hose problem (in 15+ years, it's happened once, and it kept kalk from touching the floor.)

Tap water comes in via the grey hose on the backside and connects to the toilet valve though the side of the bucket. The green hose is the extraction hose and leads to the 2nd stage sediment collection bottle, before being sucked through the pump itself. This way, there's always negative pressure on the majority of the Kalkwasser feed hose up until the pump.

I didn't skimp on the Toilet valve - I went to a plumbing shop that services commercial professional plumbers and laid out a full 15 euros for a good one, instead of one of the cheaper 6 euro units, which lasts me at least 5-8 years, which is a pretty good life expectancy I think considering the harsh conditions it's in.

The Reactor Riser bottle is a 2 liter cola bottle with the bottom cut off. The bottom is cut off in a zig-zag fashion & several large holes made into the side towards the very bottom of the bottle to allow large undissolved slurry of Kalk to pass through easily. The bottle has a loosely bound Zip-Tie attaching it to the heavy Eheim pump to hold it in place when the pump comes on, but also facilitates easy removal for annual cleaning.

The Eheim pump is something like a 2500lph pump (forgot the exact rate) which seems like overkill, but it only fires for just a few seconds each day. 5 seconds is just long enough to kick all the kalk slurry up on the bottom, and not disturb the top crust on the surface of the water too much. The other advantage to using such a powerful pump like this is, it never clogs and never really requires cleaning. I find very little build up or blockages of it during my annual reactor clean out & rebuild. It's very reliable & is the same pump that has been in there for at least 10 years now.

BTW, the plastic PEP Cola bottles break down (become brittle) after about 3-4 years and have to be replaced. Usually, it's right around the cap that cracks first as that is exposed to negative pressure and thus breaks the siphon from the pump.

This is the second stage sediment collection filter bottle. This is the accumulation of slurry / sediment after one year, which isn't a lot, but helps ensure that the kalkwasser that gets dosed to my tank is pure clear dissolved kalkwasser. Kalkwasser from the reactor comes in via the green downtube and exits via a very short 2-3cm extension just under the top cap via a siphon from the pump. The run to the pump is about 2 meters and from the pump, half a meter to my sump.

Lastly, these are my 3 display tanks. The fishroom also contains some tanks, but they're my "working tanks" (frags, growout, clownfish breeding, etc.), not meant for display. The big tank is 1000L and 2.5 meters long; and the total volume of the DTs is right at 1450L, with the other 1000L coming from the tanks and infra in the fishroom. The 4x pipes from these DTs which goes under the floor to a room on the otherside of the house to the fishroom holds approx 200L alone.

I have approx a dozen pretty significantly sized mother colonies of Softies, LPS corals, and a few SPS, which all grow pretty rapidly. (It's just me, I prefer corals that move and sway more than SPS) I harvest about half of everything you see here every 6-12 months and sell it to some local fish stores to offset my operating costs & bring more sustainability to our hobby.

The Monti's suck huge amounts of ALK and without my continuous feed Kalkwasser setup I'd be remixing 5L of Alk supplement every 5 days, but with Kalkwasser, it's more like every 20-30 days.

Cost wise, a 5Kg container of Alk Carbonate powder costs me approx 35 euros, where 500grams of Kalkwasser powder that lasts for 3 months costs me about 10 euros. So it's easy to see how that adds up over a year of cost savings.

Kalkwasser is the way to go, even if one has to use additional supplementation to "top up" any gaps Kalkwasser can't achieve.

That’s the kind of old school ingenuity that you don’t see often anymore. Impressive system you have there!

 

[Mark Bradley]

I measure my calcium and alkalinity weekly - I tend to need to add both weekly (30mls of alkalinity and 10mls of calcium) and I use Redsea. Not sure if this is the most effective way but seems to work - corals are growing and healthy. Don’t have a dosing set up so done manually. I do a 15% water change weekly using natural sea water but the reduction in alkalinity and calcium is very consistent.

 

[Forty-Two]

This was a great thread btw - I learned a lot!

 

[GoTakeANap]

Do you use a C02 scrubber at all?! We’ve been playing around with it and it seems to help stability of PH once the kalk raises it. Im working on the recirculating so that the media doesn’t waste as fast.

I do not run a CO2 scrubber after researching it. A lot of people say the media exhaust way to fast. I did run a airline tube from the skimmer to the outside and it seems to help but I don't run my skimmer 24/7 so when its not on it drops. Also have a fuge going when the skimmer is off to help but its still lower than I would like overall. This is going off apex readings.

 

[Koigula]

I have a SPS tank slowly taking off running on 100% Kalk. It is 30-40 frags 2-3" in size. All the ones purchased over 3/4" grew and smaller extra specials once struggle.

What I find is I can really dial in Kalk perfectly to keep alkalinity between 140 and 150 ppm targetting 145ppm. It is near limit of Hanna Checker so I got a 10 cc auto pipetter.

I see increases weekly and adjust the OSC program on Neptune using a 50 cc/min pump. I will generally increase demand by 50 cc of daily kalk usage every week knowing I have a chance for increased growth. Only issue I see is my Ca climbs while my Alkalinity is steady. I reached 460 Ca and sent off triton test to recheck. I will likely dose 10 cc of soda ash going forward and hold kalk steady for now. More than 2 liters of Kalk a day is sort of matching evaporation and separate Tunze top off is very lightly used in a cool basement room. I likely will not use a fan as temperature is steady and there is no other reason to increase evaporation.

Benefits were higher stable pH primarily and great control of steady alkalinity. I still use 15 cc/day Mag Mix from BRS and check monthly. It seems OK.

 

[staceyroberts]

Kalk is NOT the only one part solution to add both Ca and alk. TM's Carbocalcium adds both as well but has little to no effect on pH.

I recently stopped dripping kalk and bought some dosing pumps and am using carbocalc. It is a one part. I have not noticed any salinity increases while using it. I like it. My calc stays in the 450 range and I find myself making small adjustments based on alk. I keep my alk at 9.5 - 10.0. Any body have any other experiences with Carbocalc from Tropic Marin?

 

[Koigula]

I do not run a CO2 scrubber after researching it. A lot of people say the media exhaust way to fast. I did run a airline tube from the skimmer to the outside and it seems to help but I don't run my skimmer 24/7 so when its not on it drops. Also have a fuge going when the skimmer is off to help but its still lower than I would like overall. This is going off apex readings.

I agree with this. Fresh air exchange with outside of house with ERV or HRV works sometimes much better. I have two external holes in house to drill to finish my installation with ERV. I am waiting for a day were wife is away.