- Hi guys and girls, I'm ReefMan
and today I wanted to talk about calcium reactors,
how they work, and why you might want one for your tank.
I'll link another video above,
there's several ways you can go about
getting calcium into your tank
but over time, you will eventually need
some kind of calcium reactor if you have any size tank
above, you know, 10 or 20 or maybe 30 or 40 gallon tank.
So, once you've exhausted the kalkwasser what you have,
there are several options in calcium reactors.
It might help to talk about how they work first.
So the core feature to all calcium reactors
is going to be CO2.
So this is a five gallon, five pound CO2 tank
and it will last for quite awhile in most aquariums
in most calcium reactors.
It has a regulator on it and what you do is you set the
pressure of the CO2 so that it will come out slowly
and dissolve into water creating carbonic acid
and then it will dissolve the media.
Now there are several ways to go about doing that.
You can have just a purely manual calcium reactor
where you'll use something like this, a bubble counter,
and you'll be able to see the bubbles.
And this is not exactly for CO2 but same idea.
You'll be able to see the bubbles going up
and you'll just estimate,
okay, well my calcium reactor needs
a bubble every three seconds to do its thing.
Fully manual, doesn't need anything else.
There are other calcium reactors
like this old one that I have
and I'll show you, from Korallin,
and this is what I used on my 150 gallon tank
before I upgraded to this one
and this one requires a controller.
And so what it does is it has,
and I'll just take the top off,
it has a port in the top through which a pH probe goes.
And so you have a pH probe in the reactor
and you control it using a controller.
And your controller monitors that pH
and turns on and off a solenoid.
So this is a solenoid, it is an
electronically controlled valve
that you can turn on and off at will
with a controller or something else
which lets CO2 through it when it's open
and then doesn't when it's closed.
And so your calcium reactor might be set
probably to something like 6.8, 6.7, something like that,
and your controller, when the pH drops below that
it will turn off the solenoid, no more CO2 goes in.
And when it's above that it'll turn on the solenoid
and CO2 goes through and you get CO2, the pH goes down.
That is great because you don't have to worry
about counting bubbles,
you don't have to worry about that kind of stuff
but you do have to have an external controller for the tank.
There are other types of calcium reactors,
like the DaStaCo and I have one here
that I'm installing for my tank and it's heavy
but there's two of these in a DaStaCo
and instead of having a pH probe inside here
what happens in a DaStaCo is the controller
maintains a saturation of CO2 in the water.
(grunts) I'm gonna put that back down.
And by having a saturation of pH or of CO2 in the water
the pH in the reactor's gonna be very low, around six.
Which means that the DaStaCo needs bigger size media
than a normal calcium reactor,
it would just turn to mush if it was the small stuff.
So the DaStaCo doesn't need any extra controllers,
there's other automatic calcium reactors like this
but it's kind of a newer thing on the market.
By far the most common calcium reactor
that you're going to find
are gonna be the ones that require a separate pH probe
and your aquarium controller
to turn on and off that solenoid.
The automatic ones will either use a saturation point
or their own sort of invention to control
the amount of CO2 that they put in
so that they can dissolve the media
and put it out into your tank.
You have several options for actual media as well.
The sort of old standard is aragonite
which is just the same as the sand here.
This is the one that I had in a bucket for my old reactor.
And it is basically crushed coral and shells
and stuff like that.
I think they come from all different places,
I've even seen oyster shells used.
But you can get that pretty cheap.
That is the normal ones,
the very fine sort of sandy texture.
The DaStaCo as you saw, it runs at a lower pH
and so it needs a bigger stone size and I can show you.
I have some in a bucket from where I was cleaning it
and it's a much bigger stone,
almost like a landscaping stone that you would get.
And instead of being something
like a natural thing like crushed shells,
for DaStaCo media at least it is a mined product
and so in theory more pure
and they do triton tests and things like that to say it is
and marketing ensues.
So you have options, you have the fully automatic
calcium reactors like the DaStaCo,
you have the semi-automatic ones
that use the smarts in your controller,
your apex or your other controller like the Korallin one,
or you have the fully manual ones
and those are gonna be the cheapest one
and the least accurate for you as well.
But there's a lot of options for calcium reactors
and they all do the same thing,
they dissolve that media and put it into your tank
so that your coral can grow
and use the calcium of the water and the alkalinity.
The nice thing about a calcium reactor,
aside from a two part, something like that,
is that you can't screw up
the calcium and alkalinity balance.
It automatically introduces them
in a balanced ratio to begin with
and your coral when it uses it
it also uses it in a balanced ratio.
So in theory with a calcium reactor
you cannot get your calcium or you alkalinity
all out of whack unless you do some other
kind of dosing on top of it, which is a nice little thing.
You can also do interesting things with your calcium reactor
like the DaStaCo will do this automatically
but you can certainly do it in your own way as well.
You can have your calcium reactor put effluent out,
more calcium and alkalinity out during the day
when your coral's growing versus at night
when your coral's are not growing.
The DaStaCo comes with a little light sensor
that you can hook up and put under your aquarium lights
and then as your lights ramp up
your effluent out will ramp up with the DaStaCo
and so on at night it'll slow down
and go to a smaller amount
when you're not using as much alkalinity and calcium.
So you could do that with your own
aquarium controller as well,
it's just that you would have to have a DC pump
because you need to be able to control
how much water's going in and then you could
change the amount of flow through your reactor
using your aquarium controller for the same effect.
I haven't heard of that
as something that people actually do though
so it's kind of an interesting use,
I hadn't even considered it
until I was reading the DaStaCo manual.
I will do a video specifically about the DaStaCo
as well once I get it set up.
Quick little review, I am really surprised
at the amount of work that goes into setting it up.
It's not a simple afternoon project, at least not for me.
There are several steps, it comes from Belgium,
the instructions aren't entirely clear.
Like there are two big reactor columns
and one you fill halfway, the other you fill all the way
but they don't really identify
which is the first and which is the second
so you kinda have to do the Googling
and guess at the end of the day
as to which is the first and which is the second.
So I think they could probably increase
their guide a little bit in the manual
to be a little bit more clear
so you don't have to switch around quite so much
to figure out the details.
But I'll give you guys all a video
about the DaStaCo specifically once I have it all working.
So that was it on calcium reactors,
I think they are much easier than just dosing kalkwasser,
certainly a lot easier and less expensive
than dosing two part fluid.
If you have a big tank I would highly recommend
getting a calcium reactor.
Soft corals aren't gonna need it as much
because they don't have skeletons,
they don't need the calcium in the same way
that the something like the montipora or anacropora
or things like that, other coral, would need.
So if you have the stony corals
and you really have a lot of them
every time they branch they're growing more and more,
even if they don't look like it
they're using more and more calcium out of your water
and eventually you're just not gonna
be able to keep up with it
and like kalkwasser in your top off system
the way I've been doing
and so you'll need to invest in a calcium reactor.
So, yeah, that was it, I hope it was interesting.
I'm really curious what kind of
calcium reactors you guys are using.
Are they the automatic ones?
There're only I think three of them on the market right now,
the DaStaCo I think might've been the first
and then Deltec has one and then there's another company
that has an automatic calcium reactor that's,
I'm blanking on the name though, it's an American company,
DaStaCo is from Belgium.
And then of course Deltec I think is from Germany.
So yeah, Korallin is I think the big name,
Geo is another big name in the semi automatic ones
that you will control with your aquarium controller
and then I have honestly never looked
at the fully manual ones
because the things like the Korallin that I have here
are pretty cheap, certainly in comparison to the DaStaCo
and I didn't think that it was worth it
to have the risk of just guessing
that you have to do with a fully manual reactor.
So yeah, hope it was interesting,
I'll see you next week, bye.