New to Dosing (Red Sea Coral Foundation)

Reefer37 · Mar 1, 2020

So I'm brand new to dosing and having a really hard time wrapping my brain around amounts and figuring out how much to dose in my tank. I'm using Red Sea Coral Foundation and on the back it tells me current levels and how much to dose to get to optimal levels, but I'm not sure if these values are amounts dosed, daily, weekly, etc. Anybody using this dosing system and got any advice?
I'm running a 6 month old JBJ45 mixed reef, mostly LPS/Softies.

I have a mixed reef, but personally I'm not looking to raise my dKh to 11.5 as it recommends. I'm trying to stay around 8.5/9.

Latest readings:
Calcium: 360
Alk: 7.5
Mag: 1260

motortrendz · Mar 1, 2020

What salt are you using?
What are your nitrate and phosphate levels?

I'd leave alk were it is, raise calcium to about 400. How often do you do water changes? And how heavily stocked is your tank. Water changes may be all you need at this point to maintain.

jblasi · Mar 1, 2020

I have used Red Sea for years. Once you decide what you would like your parameter to be. Just look at the top of the label where is says 25g =....... for ALK it is 1ml per 25G equals .1 dKH. Then just do the math for how many gallons of water your dosing for and how much you need to raise it.

Reefer37 · Mar 1, 2020

motortrendz said:
What salt are you using?
What are your nitrate and phosphate levels?

I'd leave alk were it is, raise calcium to about 400. How often do you do water changes? And how heavily stocked is your tank. Water changes may be all you need at this point to maintain.

Honestly I get my water from my LFS since I've started and haven't had the ability to hook up and get an RO unit at thi. I need to find out what salt they use, but it's a very clean store and they've always been good to me. My alk up until I've stocked up was hovering 8 pretty steady, but it's really hard to get an exact reading because I only have API tests.

I do water changes about once a week, that reading was the very next day after my water change. I currently have 2 torches, a hammer, frogspawn, blasto, couple acans, a monti, a duncan, a favia, zoas, and mushrooms.

Reefer37 · Mar 2, 2020

jblasi said:
I have used Red Sea for years. Once you decide what you would like your parameter to be. Just look at the top of the label where is says 25g =....... for ALK it is 1ml per 25G equals .1 dKH. Then just do the math for how many gallons of water your dosing for and how much you need to raise it.

Once I figure out how much I want to dose. Am I dosing that amount a day/per week? That's what I'm trying to understand is how much total.

jblasi · Mar 2, 2020

Reefer37 said:
Once I figure out how much I want to dose. Am I dosing that amount a day/per week? That's what I'm trying to understand is how much total.

It will depend on the demand of the tank. You will have to monitor and figure out what the drop is in 12-24 hours. Then dose to that. The amount could change from day to day depending on how your corals are doing.

Reefer37 · Mar 5, 2020

So coming back to this:

I found a conversion page via this website that I used to dose:

Reef Chemistry Calculator

Two days ago I dosed half the recommended amount for Calcium (20ml), dKh (7ml), and a third of the Mag (50ml) recommendation since it said over half the bottle to get my level to 1350.

I checked results today and here's the levels:

Cal: 400
dKh: 7-7.5 (really hard to know on API test)
Mag: 1320
Phosphates: looks 0, but I can tell there is some green so probably really low
pH: 7.8

Now this is what I don't get. My dKh dropped/stayed around the same and my pH dropped from it's usual 8.1-8.2. I can definitely tell the change because some of my LPS don't look as happy.

Would y'all recommend dosing more dKh to offset this or what?
This dosing stuff is so complicated to me. Lol

Super Fly · Mar 6, 2020

Ur alk dropped bc higher amount of calc was dosed.
This is one of those topics that generates opposing thoughts on how to properly dose but traditionally 2part dosing should be done in equal parts as they counteract one another. If Calc increases then Alk decreases and vice versa.
If u have a desired level u'r trying to obtain, this article explains how to do this.
https://joejaworski.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/the-right-way-to-use-2-part-additives/ Maintain a log to monitor levels, as tank matures demand will increase and u have to adjust dosing amounts accordingly. Btw, dosing is done daily.

One way to tell ur tank's demand is to test the fresh salt water and compare that with ur tank water levels. The difference is the consumption amount and how much u'd want to replenish unless u have a specific level in mind already.

And I'd highly recommend getting a more precise test kit like Hana alk/calc

beaslbob · Mar 6, 2020

Reefer37 said:
So I'm brand new to dosing and having a really hard time wrapping my brain around amounts and figuring out how much to dose in my tank. I'm using Red Sea Coral Foundation and on the back it tells me current levels and how much to dose to get to optimal levels, but I'm not sure if these values are amounts dosed, daily, weekly, etc. Anybody using this dosing system and got any advice?
I'm running a 6 month old JBJ45 mixed reef, mostly LPS/Softies.

I have a mixed reef, but personally I'm not looking to raise my dKh to 11.5 as it recommends. I'm trying to stay around 8.5/9.

Latest readings:
Calcium: 360
Alk: 7.5
Mag: 1260

May I suggest you read the improved diy two part system in the chemistry forum?

see: http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-02/rhf/index.php

For a more diect answer I presume the amount recommended is the amount you dose to get to the desired value.

But than I have been wrong before also.

my .02

Reefer37 · Mar 6, 2020

Thanks guys, I appreciate the feedback and help. I'll be doing some homework and reading over these articles.
I just wish these videos on YouTube delved into the actual specifics more because they make it seem like you just put the numbers into the conversion sites for what you desire and slowly dose to raise to those levels. Obviously there's a lot more involved and everything kinda correlates with each other. Man, softies are starting to sound better and better. LOL

Js.Aqua.Project · Mar 6, 2020

I am a fellow Red Sea Product user.

The doses listed on the back of the bottle are single time doses to get your tank from its current level back up to the level you are trying to maintain.

Most of the time you can do this as a single dose and don't need to split it, which depends on how much you need to raise your values.

As a general rule of thumb, I follow these basic one time dose limits:
Ca < 20ppm
Mg < 50ppm
dKh > .2

To clarify, I use these to mean that I should not increase these values by more than the listed amount in a 24 hour period to minimize stress on the corals.

So if you are reading the bottle and are increasing each parameter by less than the stated values, you can dose it at one time without a need to split. If you are raising it by more than that value split it accordingly.

Ex:
-If you find yourself needing to raise Ca by 30ppm, then do two doses at half the total dose needed on consecutive days.
-If you need to raise CA by 50 ppm, divide the dose by three and dose on three consecutive days.

Hope that helps.

Note: If you are dosing Ca you will also need to be dosing Trace Elements. As stated above, I like the Red Sea Products so I use their's and use the simple 1:10 (Trace:Calcium) ratio to dose each of the trace elements.

beaslbob · Mar 6, 2020

Reefer37 said:
Thanks guys, I appreciate the feedback and help. I'll be doing some homework and reading over these articles.
I just wish these videos on YouTube delved into the actual specifics more because they make it seem like you just put the numbers into the conversion sites for what you desire and slowly dose to raise to those levels. Obviously there's a lot more involved and everything kinda correlates with each other. Man, softies are starting to sound better and better. LOL

thanks and good reading.

FWIW the first part of the diy two part is to do a one time correction to get everything in line. Then you start the dosing based upon what your tank is actually consuming. Another club member and I bout 10 years ago had magnesium of 700-800ppm for instance. I had a 55g they had a 180g. It took literally pounds and pounds of magnesium sulfate (epsom salts) in both tanks to get mag up to 1350ppm. But after that the improved diy dosing maintained that level.

Still that's just me and my .02

destro · Mar 6, 2020

As someone mentioned above, it depends on the demand of your system and how often you do water changes.

Frequent water changes in a less demanding system will require very little dosing or none at all.
Compared to heavily stocked system (high demand) with less water changes, frequent dosing is required to maintain stability.

I have a small system with moderate load/demand. With 5-10% water changes every other week, my auto-dose sits pretty much idle.

Every system is different. Some dose 10mL a day and others does 10mL every few hours for example. You want to avoid the swings.

You can start by testing twice a day (mourning and evening) to see the amount being depleted. After testing for a few days, you can determine the systems demand.

Reefer37 · Mar 6, 2020

Another question. I got their like all in one ABC+ powder on accident without realizing it when I ordered it.

Would it be better using an all in one formula like that for my tank than dosing individual elements?

I mean I have literally one SPS in my tank as of now and it's like a 1" Monti cap so I'm not even sure on there being enough consumption there or not. I just know my levels were low.

I know a lot of people use those all in of formulas fine, just worried it would be hard to supplement if one went out of wack or something.

Reefer37 · Mar 6, 2020

destro said:
As someone mentioned above, it depends on the demand of your system and how often you do water changes.

Frequent water changes in a less demanding system will require very little dosing or none at all.
Compared to heavily stocked system (high demand) with less water changes, frequent dosing is required to maintain stability.

I have a small system with moderate load/demand. With 5-10% water changes every other week, my auto-dose sits pretty much idle.

Every system is different. Some dose 10mL a day and others does 10mL every few hours for example. You want to avoid the swings.

You can start by testing twice a day (mourning and evening) to see the amount being depleted. After testing for a few days, you can determine the systems demand.

Yeah I'm starting to think I never really needed to dose much in the first place, but calcium and mag just seemed low.

I plan on getting some Hanna checkers so I can get a better idea on consumption cause it's next to impossible to get an actual day's usage on these API tests.

beaslbob · Mar 6, 2020

Reefer37 said:
Another question. I got their like all in one ABC+ powder on accident without realizing it when I ordered it.

...

Not familiar with that but the bulk reef site says it contains calcium, bicarbonate, strontium , magnesium, boron and so on. I'm leary of calcium and (bi)carbonates in one product. That is the reason the diy two part has separate calcium, magnesium, and carbonate mixtures. They combine when overdosed and precipitate out of the water. It is also possible I missed something also. For instance once I added magnesium mixture to my calcium mixture and formed a nice solid block of white stuff. I think is was calcium sulfate from the magnesium sulfate in the magnesium mixture.

I just prefer the diy two part because the stuff is effective and extremely inexpensive. Once setup you just dose equal parts of the calcium and alk mixtures when alk drops. And after a gallon of those are used up just add 300ml of the magnesium mixture.

But that's just me and my .02

Reefer37 · Mar 6, 2020

beaslbob said:
Not familiar with that but the bulk reef site says it contains calcium, bicarbonate, strontium , boron and so on. I may have missed it but I think the ingredients did not include magnesium. I'm leary of calcium and (bi)carbonates in one product. that is the reason the diy two part has separate calcium and carbonate mixtures. They combine when overdosed and preciptate out of the water. It is also possible I missed something also. LOL

I just prefer the diy two part because the stuff is effective and extremely inexpensive. Once setup you just dose equal parts of the calcium and alk mixtures when alk drops. And after a gallon of those are used up just add 300ml of the magnesium mixture.

But that's just me and my .02

Here's the link for the other stuff I have, not sure if that was what you were looking at. Looks like it's like an all in one sorta thing.

5 kg Reef Foundation ABC+

Boost levels of calcium, alkalinity and magnesium with Reef Foundations ABC+. Use as part of the Red Sea Reef Care Program to build strong coral skeletons. Contains Calcium, Strontium,Barium, Bicarbonates, Magnesium, Potassium, Boron, Iodine & Bromine formulated in the exact ratio as found in...

www.marinedepot.com