kalkwasser drip advice

[LONO100]

hi all, i am a first time reef keeper and i recently set up a kalkwasser drip that drops into my sump. i adjusted the check valve so that it would drip at a rate of one drop per second like i have read in many kalkwasser drip posts and articles. i made my drip out of a one gallon plastic container. in a little more than a day, it has all dropped successfully into my sump and into the tank.

my question is, how long should i wait before i begin the next drip? should i immediately make another batch of kalk and start dripping immediately? or should i wait a few days, or a week? i have a 100 gallon tank, im running a fluval 304 filter, a wet/dry sump, and ill be adding a protein skimmer pretty soon. right now, there are two tiny clowns and two small green chromis. i have two small mushroom corals, and a little batch of button polyps about the size of a silver dollar.

any help advice would be really appreciated. thanks.

 

[Moose72]

I might be wrong but it sounds like the calcium demand might be a little low, along with the amount of CO2 available for proper reaction. I would monitor your drip carefully along with your parameters and make sure it's not just precipitating out. I would think that you would be fine without a kalk drip as long as your doing your regular water changes. That is until you have a higher demand for calcium in your tank. I'll also add that I have yet to use kalk in my system, so there might be others that have a better opinion than mine.

 

[Dav3]

No need for you to do any kind of dosing. You don't have any high demand corals yet. As mentioned just keep up on water changes with a reef grade salt and you will be fine until you have a heavy lps and sps load.

 

[LONO100]

thanks for the advice, my tank is just establishing itself at this point, but i do have plans to put a few more specimens in at a bi-weekly rate. so dripping now wont serve any benefits until my tank has a higher bio-load? i should not drip until more specimens have been added? thanks again.

 

[BigRedsReefs10]

You don't need to dose a tank unless you have enough stony corals that your trace element levels are being consumed so quickly that they cannot be sustained by your weekly water change schedule. And as stated earlier you should never add a supplement that you do not gave a test kit for.

 

[Gregcoyote]

You are not at the stage where kalkwasser will be of any great benefit to you yet, IMO. It works wonders with Stoney corals and I have used it for over 30 years. Keep up your water exchanges with high quality salt mix and you will do fine.

 

[LONO100]

I've kept saltwater fish only tanks in the past but this is my first attempt at a reef setup. I have an R/O and did my own mix. The guy at the store where I bought the salt mix said if I planned to do a reef system I should use kalkwasser. I was not aware that the salt mixes had all of the required trace elements I would need. I have been out of the aquarium hobby for a few years but my old dealer sells quality saltwater, so as long as I keep my partial changes up I should be good to go? So soft corals and anemones don't require anything more than what is in a quality saltwater mix?

 

[Gregcoyote]

Yes. If you have corals go with a reef mix. If fish only something like Instant Ocean works well.

 

[LONO100]

ok, thanks for all the help everyone, I've kept marine fish only tanks for a long time, but I've been just getting back into it after many years away from it so I'm pretty rusty when it comes to all this. It was in fact instant ocean that I bought. I got it from a petsclub. I would normally have went to my local aquarium dealer but I get home from work after thery close and I didn't want to wait another week to start cycling my tank. So that's probably why he told me to do the kalk. So since I used instant ocean, I mixed 100 gallons of it, I have done a twenty percent change with my local dealers water, and have so far added a gallon of water kalkwasser mix. Should I stop at this point until I move on to hard coral? I also plan to do anemones at some point as well. Thanks everyone.

 

[BigRedsReefs10]

Did you switch to a reef salt?

 

[Gregcoyote]

If your not keeping hard corals, just use about any salt mix you want. If and when you start growing hard corals, then kalkwasser and reef grade salt is a good combination. But until you have a densely packed system, water exchanges using RO/DI water and salts like Kent Reef and Reef Crystals will be all you need.

 

[LONO100]

sounds good, thanks everyone for all the help. im still trying to get my sea legs back in the aquarium hobby (no pun intended).