Dosing calcium and alkalinity?

[sfsuphysics]

I know there is an apex dosing system but honestly I have been thinking that an apex might be over kill for my Nano. Do you have any suggestions on entry level dosing system?

Kamoer X1 dosing pump. I've been meaning to do a review on them. But as the name suggests it's a dosing pump, it can dose tiny amounts, and has built in bluetooth so you can control it through a phone and program it, and 2 of them would probably be fine.

Of course, with a true nano sized tank, I would probably just do water changes to deal with lower calcium & alkalinity levels. Easy enough to mix up a new batch, do some relatively large water change >30% on a weekly basis, probably would take a while to cost more than any equipment you buy for the dosing set up.

 

[IOnceWasLegend]

Of course, with a true nano sized tank, I would probably just do water changes to deal with lower calcium & alkalinity levels. Easy enough to mix up a new batch, do some relatively large water change >30% on a weekly basis, probably would take a while to cost more than any equipment you buy for the dosing set up.

While this is true in many circumstances, I'd also advise that you test your alk/cal usage to see how much you're using prior to taking this approach.

Using my own system as an example: I was using up ~0.7 dkh/day when I started testing. That was a weekly usage of 4.9 dkh of alk and 35 ppm of calcium. So unless I wanted to do water changes ~3 times a week, that wasn't a good option to keep stability.

(Granted, my situation may not have been the norm because I had a ton of LPS in there...but hammers home the point that each system needs husbandry tailored to its needs, haha.)

 

[max_nano]

While this is true in many circumstances, I'd also advise that you test your alk/cal usage to see how much you're using prior to taking this approach.

Using my own system as an example: I was using up ~0.7 dkh/day when I started testing. That was a weekly usage of 4.9 dkh of alk and 35 ppm of calcium. So unless I wanted to do water changes ~3 times a week, that wasn't a good option to keep stability.

(Granted, my situation may not have been the norm because I had a ton of LPS in there...but hammers home the point that each system needs husbandry tailored to its needs, haha.)

It also becomes difficult because at different all levels there is a different uptake. I need to get it setup again, but when I monitored my alk with the KH guardian the slope was much steeper when the alk got to different levels. Like once it got to 9 it went to 8 in a day after having gone down much slower before then. Anecdotal but that was my experience

 

[sfsuphysics]

(Granted, my situation may not have been the norm because I had a ton of LPS in there...but hammers home the point that each system needs husbandry tailored to its needs, haha.)

True, but in this case the original poster (not sure if he or she) stated they aren't putting corals in any time soon. With out corals, coraline algae is the only thing that is going to be sucking up calcium and alkalinity. And there really is zero reason to have any sort of dosing setup if you really don't have much of any demand, I would say the same thing for a tank full of softies.

 

[IOnceWasLegend]

True, but in this case the original poster (not sure if he or she) stated they aren't putting corals in any time soon. With out corals, coraline algae is the only thing that is going to be sucking up calcium and alkalinity. And there really is zero reason to have any sort of dosing setup if you really don't have much of any demand, I would say the same thing for a tank full of softies.

Truth. That was more of a 'general case' statement than this specific instance.