I have never seen this, I'm tagging along to see its affects
Glad to have you on board!:bigsmile:
This is really cool! I may have to give this a try. A couple questions....
Where do you buy the media from? Medical supply store? Did you have to upgrade the air intake from your skimmer to fit onto the reactor?
Do you just fill the tlf reactor to the top or is there a certain amount that needs to be added for your tank volume?
We purchased our soda lime from Airgas. We did need an adapter (TLF makes one) for the intake on our Deltec skimmer, but the SRO did not require one. We fill the reactor to the top.
I've been running one myself for 6 months or so; very happy with the results. I find the media is still effective even after it's color change happens; I change it when the pH lows warrant it.
Hmmm... We definitely notice the pH drop once all of the media in the reactor changes color.
question about the geo818 and your kalk reactor with this c02 scrubber... how are you dosing the kalk now if not via top off? How did you get a scare in november with the kalk? are you sill dosing the kalk in conjunction with the c02 scrubber? I too have a GEO 818 and it is driving my tanks PH down to 7.5 and i am barely able to keep up with the demand. i am seriously considering kalk but am curious what the c02 scrubbers numbers are including cost for a 5 gallon jug. thanks for the reply ahead of time!!
what ph do you run your GEO at?
That's a lot of questions at once, LOL.
I'll start with the kalk scare. Without going into too much detail, we had a middle of the night incident where our Deltec skimmer mysteriously decided to flood. This would not have been a real problem if the ball valve for the drain line on the skimmer cup had NOT been left open. The drain line was connected to a 5g bucket next to our 2nd sump. Needless to say, the skimmer dumped 70g of water onto the garage floor and the ATO kicked in and proceeded to pump several days worth of kalk into our system.
When we discovered the problem late the next morning, our salinity had dropped to 1.018 and the ph was
9.27. We were fortunate to have the ability to intervene quickly to contain and replace a large portion of the bad water. In the end, we lost 1 small SPS colony and lost a good portion of 2 larger colonies.
After that incident, we separated our kalk dosing from our ATO using a separate pump attached to our GEO Kalk reactor that is controlled by our APEX. We dose kalk 4x/hour from 10:00 PM to 4:PM when our MH's come on.
Before adding the CO2 scrubbers, our pH range was between 7.70 and 7.95 (sometimes dropping down into the upper 7.6 range). Since adding the scrubbers, the pH range is between 7.95 and 8.25.
We are using TLF Reborn which is a coarser media in the GEO 818. The pH in the Ca reactor is controlled by our Apex and avg's 6.45.
We purchased our soda lime from Airgas locally for $80. If you don't have an Airgas location near you, I've seen it available online for as low as $89 thru Wayfair w/no shipping charges.
-Terry :bigsmile:
