Question about dosing Calcium & KH Supplements

[Silvio]

I finally got around to mixing up some home made supplements from Randy Holmes Farley's recipes. I'm not sure if I didn't print the whole article, but I didn't see instructions for dosing. So, here are my questions:

To Maintain Current Calcium and Hardness:
How much of each supplement should I dose at a time?

How often should I should I dose?

If I need to raise calcium should I dose additional Calcium supplement or cut back on the hardness supplement?

What about Magnesium? I don't have a test kit for it and I've never used a supplement. I remember Randy saying that it is a good idea to dose magnesium at least once every 6 months even if you're not monitoring Mg in your tank.

Background: I have 2 tanks: one 90 with about 20 Gal in the sump with a mix of SPS, LPS and softies the other tank is a 90 with softies and LPS and no sump.

 

[nunofs]

Check out this calculator, it has dosing info for Randy's recipes: http://home.comcast.net/~jdieck1/chem_calc3.html

Nuno

 

[Silvio]

Thank you. I'll check it out.

 

[Moe_K]

When I began dosing B_Ionic, I took baseline (before starting the supplement) calcium and alkalinity measures.
Then I added around 10 ml of part 1, waited an hour, and added 10 ml of part 2.
The next day I tested calcium and alkalinity again.
The results told me that 10ml of each was too little to keep my calcium and alk in the target range.
I kept increasing the doses until the tests showed the levels were right. I found I needed to add 30 ml of each every night to keep my 55 g tank in range.

Starting low, testing, then raising the doses might be the way to determine how much you need. It's a slow process, but it works.

 

[JustDavidP]

Well said Moe...

 

[nunofs]

From my experience, the calculator above is pretty accurate... I used to dose b-ionic according to what the calculator recommended, and testing the next day would show values very close to what I expected. FWIW, I only waited a minute or two between dosing part 1 and part 2, just enough for the "cloudiness" in the sump to dissipate.

I don't think it's very useful to know how much you need to dose to keep current levels, because any new corals you add to the tank will change the consumption rate of alk/calcium... but if you're not planning on doing major additions, then a practical way of calculating it is taking test readings every day, or every other day for a few days (without dosing anything) and see how much the levels drop... divide by the number of days and you have your daily consumption in dkH of alk and ppm of calcium. Then add those numbers to your current levels to get your target levels and input the whole thing into the calculator.

Regarding the frequency of dosing, it's a balance between stability and convenience... if you dose every day the parameters will remain more stable, while if you dose once a week or so they will fluctuate much more (but you'll have less work). At a time I was dosing every day...

Nuno

 

[JustDavidP]

I drip kalk and dose B-Ionics every day. I did the week long tests and figured out my dosing. I added my new sqamosa and a new acro and it didn't change at all. I checked again one month later and found that I had to up by literally just a few ml. I typically judge my needs to re-test for Calcium and Alk based on the growth of coral and clam scutes. I check PH often though.

D

 

[Silvio]

Thanks for all the advice.