Sorry for late replies;
- I dose kalk through my ATO, I checked last month and I evaporate about 1.5 gallons a day. (Is this a lot?)
- I dose though a home made mixer. It's a tall tube with a maxijet plumbed such that water at the top is blasted into the bottom of the tube for 1 minute 4 times a day (12AM, 6AM, 12PM, 6PM). One minute is just enough to bring a cloud up to almost the intake of the pump (kalk grit eats impellers)
- The ATO RO water is injected at the halfway mark of the tube, the output from the mixed to the sump is at the very top. The theory is that the kalkpowder is mixed up enough by the pump to keep the solution saturated. When the ATO kicks in, it takes CLEAR solution from the top of the tube (the tube is I think about 4 feet tall).
Mine is basically build on whatever plans this was based on, if not in fact this one exactly;
A reef aquarium in Dubai, United Arab Emirates
camelreef.free.fr
However, my pump intake is attached to a PVC pipe on an elbow, so intake is from the top of the tube and output is at the bottom.
- My ATO is fed by a SpectraPure litermeter (the "Ultimate Auto Top Off", which I'm not sure if they still sell) so it is a peristaltic pump forcing low volumes of water into the stirrer to squirt out kalk into the sump, where it dumps into the section that the drains empy...so it drips into the fast moving sump "intake".
- Since I've taken a closer look at my alk readings lately, thanks to the hanna checker making it easier, I've been bringing ALK up using the alk part of the 2 part solution (Randy's formula of washing soda, but using stuff I bought from BRS, not Arm & Hammer) and NOT dosing calcium. I've been bringing alk up to around 10.0 as my CA is measured at about 600 ppm, which is too high, and yet the alk of 10.0 doesn't seem to precipitate it all out.
pH is about 8.2 ish.
And yes, most of my corals are softies. I've been bringing alk up to help the hard corals (LPS and one or two sps).
- Future plans - taking kalk off ATO, and dosing it directly...
I've read quite a few opinions that using Kalk as ATO is inconsistent, and it's true, as you rely on evaporation and also on whenever your ATO decides to kick in. So I'm now thinking that maybe I'll get another peristaltic pump to dose the kalk, and have the ATO simply top off RO water. As long as the kalk dosing is LESS than the evaporation rate, then it should not overflow and the ATO will only kick in every once in a while, and then only when needed. That would certainly provide more consistency in dosing. I could guess that at 1.5 gallons/day I'll just do some math to figure out the dosing rate and do a constant dose, rather than dosing it all over an hour or two. But I'm lazy, we'll see if this ever happens.
V
