Handheld ph meter recommendation for kalk reservoir

[newfly]

Looking to buy a handheld ph meter to check on kalk solution. Amazon have meter ranges from $10 to >$100.

is the cheap unit consistent? I can live with lower accuracy but like to have higher consistency.

 

[JVU]

I’ve tried several and not found them reliable enough, either conductivity or pH. I went back to just carefully weighing out the amount to be added (with a little extra), stirring well initially, and not checking after.

 

[newfly]

I’ve tried several and not found them reliable enough, either conductivity or pH. I went back to just carefully weighing out the amount to be added (with a little extra), stirring well initially, and not checking after.

thanks. Good information. I’ll skip the meter then.

Just wondering if I add say too much kalk which cause the solid to settle at the bottom. If I’m drawing from 2-3 inch from the bottom, it will not cause any harm right?

Also, as the kalk solution is used up, can I just add more rodi and stir it again? Will the settlement at the bottom dissolve with more fresh water added?

 

[JVU]

thanks. Good information. I’ll skip the meter then.

Just wondering if I add say too much kalk which cause the solid to settle at the bottom. If I’m drawing from 2-3 inch from the bottom, it will not cause any harm right?

Also, as the kalk solution is used up, can I just add more rodi and stir it again? Will the settlement at the bottom dissolve with more fresh water added?

If you are going for a saturated solution you should add a little too much, that’s the best way to know it’s saturated. The undissolved at the bottom won’t be a problem as long as you don’t directly suck it up. Even if you don’t add extra you’ll get stuff at the bottom as it reacts with CO2 and falls out of solution anyway.

You can do that, just adding more water and re-stirring. The undissolved kalk on the bottom will dissolve in. That’s basically what a kalk stirrer automates. I don’t because it’s easy to lose track of when to add more kalk and you can’t really tell by looking because there’s the already-reacted calcium carbonate on the bottom too. When I add water I add kalk so it’s easy.

 

[Darkxerox]

I just keep adding RO water to my kalk container and more kalk each time to keep it saturated. Really only need to clean out the precipitate or undissolved stuff if it's getting close to your inlet line.

 

[newfly]

What’s your tank alk consumption and how much is covered by kalk?

I’m still deciding if kalk is a waste of time. My tank consume 3.6dkh and I’m doing 1liters kalk which is approximately 0.5dkh . I can go up to high 3 or 4l max (my evaporation rate ) which still only half my tank need.

I’m doing it because

1. I have a spare dosing pump.
2. Some ph boast at night - I’m only dose at night. How much boast, I don’t know. Don’t have a ph probe.
3. Slightly cheaper?

 

[Darkxerox]

What’s your tank alk consumption and how much is covered by kalk?

I’m still deciding if kalk is a waste of time. My tank consume 3.6dkh and I’m doing 1liters kalk which is approximately 0.5dkh . I can go up to high 3 or 4l max (my evaporation rate ) which still only half my tank need.

I’m doing it because

1. I have a spare dosing pump.
2. Some ph boast at night - I’m only dose at night. How much boast, I don’t know. Don’t have a ph probe.
3. Slightly cheaper?

A little under a liter for a 29g tank right now, basically what it evaporates daily. I measured my alk for the first time in months and it was 8.8 so it must be keeping up fine.

 

[JVU]

What’s your tank alk consumption and how much is covered by kalk?

I’m still deciding if kalk is a waste of time. My tank consume 3.6dkh and I’m doing 1liters kalk which is approximately 0.5dkh . I can go up to high 3 or 4l max (my evaporation rate ) which still only half my tank need.

I’m doing it because

1. I have a spare dosing pump.
2. Some ph boast at night - I’m only dose at night. How much boast, I don’t know. Don’t have a ph probe.
3. Slightly cheaper?

I dose 6-7 liters of saturated CaOH2 (Kalkwasser) per day, when the pH would otherwise be going down because of less photosynthesis. This is about half of my alk consumption, the rest is covered with carbonate dosing during the day. Limited mainly by evaporation amount. Also sometimes my pH is getting too high and I don’t want to push it higher.

I’ve been very happy with it. Gives me an easy way to boost pH, which I mostly care about as a margin of safety against RTN, STN, brown jelly, and other microbial issues that can quickly lower the pH and worsen coral health further making them more susceptible, causing a feed-forward loop we call crashing.

It also saves me a lot of money, since dosing is one of my main costs, and this reduces it by about half.

In my opinion you should be real-time or at least daily monitoring pH to use CaOH2 safely because it has such strong effects on pH. To me not monitoring pH is like not monitoring temperature or salinity. Others may disagree.

 

[Chromis]

I agree, monitoring pH is a safeguard when you are dosing stuff that affects it. You can program a fail-safe to shut off the kalkwasser, etc if pH is above a set point, and you can know when your dosing pumps are failing. I have had a number of BRS pumps that worked great for many years (I think overall they are very reliable and I got my money's worth) but the way they fail is to partially miss a dose once in a while, before they become totally erratic and screw up your dose schedule, and you can only see this on a pH-time measurement.

 

[Chromis]

Also wanted to say I recently bought a Hanna "HI98103 Checker pH Tester with 0.1 pH Resolution" hand-held pH meter, and it works pretty well for the cost ($38).

 

[The_Lazy_Reefer]

What’s your tank alk consumption and how much is covered by kalk?

I’m still deciding if kalk is a waste of time. My tank consume 3.6dkh and I’m doing 1liters kalk which is approximately 0.5dkh . I can go up to high 3 or 4l max (my evaporation rate ) which still only half my tank need.

I’m doing it because

1. I have a spare dosing pump.
2. Some ph boast at night - I’m only dose at night. How much boast, I don’t know. Don’t have a ph probe.
3. Slightly cheaper?

I recently joined the kalk train for those exact reasons and after 2 months of it all of that is true but what I find even more appealing is the acros responded to the kalk super well, I’ve kept my ph in the same range before so it’s not the bump in PH although that always helps growth but my thinking is there’s something to dosing kalk that the acros just love besides the obvious things. Moral of the story; kalk is worth it imo