(upbeat electronic music)
- Hi guys and girls, I'm ReefMan, and I wanted to tell you
about maintaining calcium and alkalinity in your aquarium.
Obviously as reef keepers, we are primarily concerned
with the health of our coral and our fish.
And the health of our coral,
the best way to measure that is if it's growing or not.
In order for it to grow, it has to have calcium
and alkalinity in the water
so that it can precipitate out and make its skeleton, right.
So in order to grow,
we have to dose calcium and alkalinity.
When you're first starting out it's really easy
to get enough into your water just by doing water changes.
If you use a reef salt, it generally has
a level of calcium that is acceptable,
around four 450, 400, 450 parts per million,
and generally has a reasonable dKH alkalinity,
maybe like somewhere between nine and 11 or so.
And you get around just fine, just doing water changes,
but the more your coral grows,
you start off with just a little frag,
and then it's like two.
It branches a little bit and then pretty soon
it's got like a whole bunch of growth tips on it.
Each time that it branches it's gonna be using
more and more calcium and alkalinity out of your water.
You'll have to dose something.
A lot of people start with dosing two-part
which is one part that is a saturation of calcium,
maybe calcium chloride or something like that.
And then the other part is alkalinity,
might be, I'm blanking on the chemical name,
but, you know, a chemical that provides alkalinity.
Remember that alkalinity is not really a thing, right?
It's just the measurement of how much acid
you can put in the water without impacting the pH.
So any base can provide alkalinity,
so it's just a matter of getting a chemical
that will do that but isn't going to kill your coral.
So yeah, a lot of times two-part,
you dose the calcium, you dose the alkalinity,
it's easy to get a little bit off with that though
because your tank might use a little bit more alkalinity
than calcium for some reason, or maybe your pH swings a lot
and because of that you you get out of balance,
and it's easy to end up with really high calcium
and maybe the alkalinity you think is low,
or your alkalinity goes way up
and your calcium is still low,
and you have to kind of measure each one,
and it gets annoying over time.
There are other ways to do it.
What I use in my tank right now at least is Kalkwasser.
I'm slowly working my way through this bucket
of Drs. Foster's and Smith Kalkwasser.
It's just a powder.
You mix it into your top-off water usually,
and in there you dose it into the tank.
Kalkwasser is great
because it provides
a balanced calcium and alkalinity.
You can't get it unbalanced in your tank
because you're dosing the one thing that works both ways.
The problem with Kalkwasser is
it increases your pH, sometimes substantially.
For example today I dosed my tank.
Well I didn't dose but I changed out my top-off water
with where I put my Kalkwasser,
and the tank was kind of low
so it pumped maybe a gallon in,
and if you look at my pH graph,
I'll put it on the screen for you,
you can see there's a spike that it goes
almost all the way up to nine which is way too high.
That's not good, and then it comes back down immediately
as the tank mixes but you can see.
My normal pH graph goes up and down
between maybe 7.9
and 8.4 or 8.5, somewhere around there.
But you can see that today it just went way up
and then came back down and 8.4 for the whole day
because of all that Kalkwasser that went in in the morning.
Kalkwasser is great if you have low pH.
It's not something that you can use for forever though,
because you can only dose so much top-off water
in your tank every day.
You only evaporate so much water.
In my tank I evaporate five gallons of water
maybe every other day so maybe like 2 1/2 gallons of water
a day is what I evaporate off of my tank.
And that's all the top-off water I can put in,
and I can make the top-off water
more concentrated up to a point with Kalkwasser
but I'm pretty close at least today and recently,
I'm pretty close to the maximum amount of Kalkwasser
that I can put in my top-off water,
and that is about two teaspoons per gallon of water
if you are interested in mixing up your own Kalkwasser.
That's the saturation limit, the most that you can put in.
So the next step from there is a calcium reactor,
and a calcium reactor is problematic
because I did suffer with low pH for a while,
and calcium reactors work by having a CO2 tank,
a place that you can put aragonite or a calcium substrate,
and then it bubbles the CO2 through water,
makes that water really acidic,
maybe around a pH of 6 or 6.5,
and then that low pH acidic water
goes through the calcium substrate, dissolves it,
and then drips into your tank,
which is okay, it's great.
You have a balanced calcium alkalinity source
just like with Kalkwasser,
but you are dosing
a 6.8, seven pH
liquid into your water constantly which is not so great
for low pH tanks like mine,
which is why a lot of people actually they dose Kalkwasser
and also have a calcium reactor
because the calcium reactor in the long run
really just works a lot better than dosing Kalkwasser,
but Kalkwasser has such a big impact on your pH
that it can kind of like overcome that.
Other things that people do is they take
their Chaeto reactor or their algae reactor,
like if I have my Pax Bellum
I would be planning on taking the output
from a calcium reactor and running it through the algae,
and obviously as we all know plants,
they absorb CO2, and then photosynthesis happens,
and you get sugars and everything that the plant uses,
but you also get oxygen out.
So hopefully, fingers crossed, the calcium reactor output
going through the Pax Bellum reactor
will end up having a higher pH than it would
if it just was going straight into the tank.
So that's an option.
There are also other kinds of reactors
that are a little bit less finicky,
but at the end of the day
they all have low pH on the output.
Now calcium reactors, they have a lot of things
you have to adjust.
Most of them you'll have to adjust the amount of CO2
that goes in to detect how or to to set how much pH
you need, how low in the calcium reactor
you want the pH to be.
And you want that to be around six, 6 1/2.
So you dial in your CO2, and you dial in how much water
you're gonna send through it,
and you have a pH probe in the reactor.
You get your balance all right, and it's cool.
It works, and then your coral grows and you need
a little bit more calcium because you've added some frags
or the frags are growing,
and they have more of those growth tips.
So now you have to readjust everything about that reactor,
and it can be a pain.
Some of them are more easy to adjust than others.
There are other types of calcium reactors out there,
particularly one called the DaStaCo reactor
which is sold in the United States by Unique Coral,
but I think it's more popular in Europe right now.
It is actually all self-contained,
and is able to figure out through magic and science
how to keep its internals at the right pH
without you having to mess with it.
So all you have to do is hook up a CO2 tank
and the computer for the DaStaCo controller,
and it will use its own internal logic
to get the bubble rate correct
so that the pH in the system is around six,
and then all you have to do with the DaStaCo reactor
is tell it how much water you want out.
So I'm thinking, probably the one that I would go with
is the DaStaCo if you have the money for it.
It is unfortunately expensive.
There's no way around that one.
They are definitely on the higher end
of calcium reactor prices,
but for that price you don't have to worry
about all of those different options
and settings you have to dial in.
It should be much more plug-and-play.
So yeah, those are the options you have
with controlling calcium and alkalinity,
two-part where you dose the calcium and the alkalinity
something like Kalkwasser in your top-off water,
which works great,
it's balanced but it spikes your pH,
a normal style calcium reactor
where you have to adjust the settings
and then sort of keep an eye on them over time
as your needs change,
or something like the DaStaCo reactor
if you have a little bit more money,
where you can really just let it figure it out,
and not have to worry about it so much.
So those are the options.
I'm curious what you've done in your tank.
I am probably going to get the DaStaCo
at some point here this year,
as my Kalkwasser options
are kind of becoming unsustainable in the tank,
but we'll see.
I'm gonna try to milk the Kalkwasser as long as I can,
and I will certainly keep you informed
as to my decision when we get there.
So yeah, enjoy.
Hopefully you're not having trouble
with your calcium in your tank.
Really it is not that hard,
just gotta keep an eye on it,
test it once in a while,
and keep it around 450 or so.
But corals are very sensitive to changes,
particularly in alkalinity and calcium,
so if you're lower than that, if you're higher than that,
things are growing fine, that's fine.
Don't worry about it.
Just keep it stable and your corals will grow and do well.
See you next time, bye.