KenRexford
Active Member
First controller use for me, Hydros Control 4. I was explaining the benefit of the Ph monitoring to a non-reefing friend and thought I’d share for non-controller reefers.
The graphing of the Ph levels over time serves 4 main purposes for me.
First, but least valuable IMO, is the basic wave showing high late afternoon, low in morning. Interesting, but not that valuable.
Second, the overall Ph level is nice, but the charted numbers aren’t that critical other than guesstimating an average.
Third, and really cool, are the micro-spikes. The chart has instant spikes quickly disappearing. That’s from the dosing pump kicking out new alk or calcium into the sump, dissipated shortly after. The presence of these spikes tells me that the dosing pump is working. If my pumps stopped, I would expect no more spikes and could then take action.
Fourth, and also cool/useful, is the slow increase or decrease over time at the low point. I was dosing 50ml/day but needed to adjust up on Fridays. I saw the bottom of the curve keep dropping lower each day. When I then changed the dosing to 85ml/day, the bottom almost leveled, showing about 0.01 higher each day. This tells me that maybe 83ml/day is ideal? If the curve is leveled perfectly but then starts lowering each day over time, I will probably have indications that the coral growth is such as to merit increase of dosing. Now, obviously my weekly test tells me that also, but redundant indicators seems nice. If I see a radical shift, that might indicate a different problem, like maybe a dosing tube falling off or clogging.
Anyone have any other chart-related observations to share?
The graphing of the Ph levels over time serves 4 main purposes for me.
First, but least valuable IMO, is the basic wave showing high late afternoon, low in morning. Interesting, but not that valuable.
Second, the overall Ph level is nice, but the charted numbers aren’t that critical other than guesstimating an average.
Third, and really cool, are the micro-spikes. The chart has instant spikes quickly disappearing. That’s from the dosing pump kicking out new alk or calcium into the sump, dissipated shortly after. The presence of these spikes tells me that the dosing pump is working. If my pumps stopped, I would expect no more spikes and could then take action.
Fourth, and also cool/useful, is the slow increase or decrease over time at the low point. I was dosing 50ml/day but needed to adjust up on Fridays. I saw the bottom of the curve keep dropping lower each day. When I then changed the dosing to 85ml/day, the bottom almost leveled, showing about 0.01 higher each day. This tells me that maybe 83ml/day is ideal? If the curve is leveled perfectly but then starts lowering each day over time, I will probably have indications that the coral growth is such as to merit increase of dosing. Now, obviously my weekly test tells me that also, but redundant indicators seems nice. If I see a radical shift, that might indicate a different problem, like maybe a dosing tube falling off or clogging.
Anyone have any other chart-related observations to share?
