hey Steve,

That is actually not a bad alk consumption at all if you have a good load on the system.

My last 150 sps system consumed almost 1.5 meq/l or dkh ( i dont remember wich units..what does salifert test in ?) a day (with a heavy coral/fish load).

I believe Jamies consumes about the same.

I noticed this originally when my bottles of co2 needed changing and the reactor was off the system for a day or two. Then during future changes i could always guage consumption.

More Alk Consumption in my opinion, just boils down to really good coral growth and/or more pollution.

Another thing i noticed, but didnt understand...is that it seemed to level out after about 2-3 days, and remain almost stable but very low alk..like 2.0, its almost like at that level, the corals possibly didnt do much growing therefore not much consumption.

Marc.

Hey Marc, I was thinking along the same line but no one else has mentioned that they noticed the same thing. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.

Steve

Steve how is your alkalinity these days? Did you perform your 50% water change yet? Did you find the cause of your rapid depletion?

nope didn't do the water change yet. going to do it when I empty the tank to remove the sand bed.

ya the cause of the dropping is the corals, growth has exploded and they are sucking the ALK up like there is no tomorrow, good thing my kalk reactor is keeping up with the Ca demands. I have a few things to get built for other people then I have to either fix my old Ca reactor of build myself a new on to control my Alk levels.

Steve

Steve,

There is an article on pH is this month's Reefkeeping Magazine:

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-09/rhf/index.htm

well at my level of 7.9 to 8.0 I am with in the acceptable range for that article, and sence my take is exploding with growth I am not concidering it much of a problem, but a good read thanks.

Steve