hey guys I see everybody with a cal. Reactor and this and that. Can somebody break it down to me barny style? How and what makes a cal. Reactor work and the goods and bads.what is doseing? Is there any advanced reefing for “idiots” books. Anything is helpful. Thanks guys/ladies.
Are you wanting to move to hard corals? Softies will not have any benefit to extra calcium. Hard corals from a chemistry standpoint need calcium, alkalinity and magnesium. Those can all be added by dosing or water changes. Most people don't dose unless you have a substantial amount of hard corals at which point water changes aren't replacing those 3 things as fast as they are being depleted.
I have 5-6 hard corals and just like to learn more on how everybody keeps there tanks so healthy. I have not had any problems so I’m trying to keep it that way of corse.
I just got some new lights to try to help out my tank getting ready to make me a better sump with a fuge in it, so if im doing all that why not try to keeep it all updated at the same time. Just a thought of corse.
Sps corals will be more demanding and deplete calcium magnesium and alkalinity faster than Lps. Calcium reactor work but most of our members trust dosing more. Calcium reactors basically use carbon dioxide to lower pH and break down calcium that would be released to tank.
Calcium reactors come in to play when you have lots and lots of large colonies of growing SPS. Until then it's much easier to replace alkalinity and calcium with dosing. Even when my tank was pretty mature I was only dosing about 140 cc of alk and calcium per day. If you have a 3-6 year old SPS tank it may prove to be a good investment. Not really in to calcium reactors but basically they use calcium carbonate and CO2 (as an acid source) to create calcium and carbonate. It requires pretty close monitoring of the pH of the reactor effluent but as I understand once dialed in they are a cheap and easy way to provide large quantities of calcium and alkalinity.
I was able to manually dose Ca and Alk quite a while before dosing pumps were needed. Step 1 may simply be testing once a month, maybe more if your not doing water changes.
Yeah even when my 125 was jam packed of SPS I was still dosing Alk and Ca. I got my mg from using Fritz and just going water changes. No reactor for me.
I use calc, alk and mag supplements from BRS in bulk. I mix up a gallon jug of each and use a doser under my cabinet. Seems to work well.
