Brodo Swaggins
Community Member
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2020
- Messages
- 84
- Reaction score
- 72
- What state or country do you live in
- Arizona
I live in Arizona, which means most of the year my house is closed up and AC is blasting. As you might imagine, I struggle mightily with pH. My lows during the night can get all the way down to 7.6. In response I started running a CO2 scrubber along with Kalkwasser with great results. My pH can really be as high as I want it to be. My daily alkalinity consumption went from 0.1 dKh during the days of 7.6 pH to over 1.3 dKh, consistently for months now. Great success!
With fall arriving and temperatures cooling, I started opening my window. This has led to even higher pH. My pH has started a daily swing from 8.2 to 8.7 everyday and could be higher if wanted. My pH is staying higher for longer at night. As a result I’ve seen another 0.5 dKh of alkalinity consumption, for a total of 1.8 dKh. I do have a heavily stocked tank with many sps and lps, so the number itself isn’t unimaginable, but it is a rapid increase. I am confident it’s not a measurement error.
I’m here for a sanity check - I don’t see any precipitation at all, so I’m wondering if this truly is increased consumption due to having ridiculously high pH for many hours per day. My acros all seem happy, nobody seems stressed. No milky substances in the water or white precipitate on the pumps or glass. I haven’t seen any downsides to doing this yet.
One thing that’s interesting to me is mineral accretion technology, aka BioRock, and there are interesting parallels to my pH quandary. That method works by drastically increasing pH locally to the corals, which causes precipitation and as a result very easy coral calcification. The energy input from the power source does the work for the corals. The resulting growth can be as high as 20x faster than no energy input, according to the research. From my understanding, since this very high pH is not throughout the whole water column, the tank chemistry is still stable. Comparing to my tank having pH up to 8.7, it seems like this is a similar deal in which calcification is much easier for the corals but is not high enough to cause precipitation (as far as I can observe). This may explain what’s happening in my situation. I think 0.5-0.6 dKh precipitation would be high enough to cause observable changes in the tank, but I don’t know for sure. I’d love to hear thoughts (especially Randy’s!)
If I’m confident that this increased alkalinity uptake isnt from precipitation, I am considering getting a calcium reactor to fill the gap of extra consumption without further increasing pH. I want to get my alkalinity consumption as high as possible (but without precipitation)!
Anyways, any thoughts are much appreciated. Thanks!
With fall arriving and temperatures cooling, I started opening my window. This has led to even higher pH. My pH has started a daily swing from 8.2 to 8.7 everyday and could be higher if wanted. My pH is staying higher for longer at night. As a result I’ve seen another 0.5 dKh of alkalinity consumption, for a total of 1.8 dKh. I do have a heavily stocked tank with many sps and lps, so the number itself isn’t unimaginable, but it is a rapid increase. I am confident it’s not a measurement error.
I’m here for a sanity check - I don’t see any precipitation at all, so I’m wondering if this truly is increased consumption due to having ridiculously high pH for many hours per day. My acros all seem happy, nobody seems stressed. No milky substances in the water or white precipitate on the pumps or glass. I haven’t seen any downsides to doing this yet.
One thing that’s interesting to me is mineral accretion technology, aka BioRock, and there are interesting parallels to my pH quandary. That method works by drastically increasing pH locally to the corals, which causes precipitation and as a result very easy coral calcification. The energy input from the power source does the work for the corals. The resulting growth can be as high as 20x faster than no energy input, according to the research. From my understanding, since this very high pH is not throughout the whole water column, the tank chemistry is still stable. Comparing to my tank having pH up to 8.7, it seems like this is a similar deal in which calcification is much easier for the corals but is not high enough to cause precipitation (as far as I can observe). This may explain what’s happening in my situation. I think 0.5-0.6 dKh precipitation would be high enough to cause observable changes in the tank, but I don’t know for sure. I’d love to hear thoughts (especially Randy’s!)
If I’m confident that this increased alkalinity uptake isnt from precipitation, I am considering getting a calcium reactor to fill the gap of extra consumption without further increasing pH. I want to get my alkalinity consumption as high as possible (but without precipitation)!
Anyways, any thoughts are much appreciated. Thanks!
