Good thinking Lance. My wife damn near made me eat the BRS jugs when she found out I had paid that much for them and shipped them to boot.

I have to disagree with you. Ime, I have always had to turn up the reactor, turn up the reactor, turn up the reactor as the demand for calcium and alkalinty rose in a growing tank. Many people do "set and forget", but they often don't realize their numbers are falling. I suppose using a controller with multiple probes would probably help to eliminate these issues, but there goes more money. Likewise, dosing pumps would be much more "set and forget" on a controller too.

I hear you on that! I am not one to jump on the newest products on the market to be the guinea pig. No thanks, someone else can risk their money and their reef! :p I still won't touch an LED system; I haven't seen enough proof yet - actually I have seen zero firsthand proof so far. :eek: Zeovit was prominent for 3-4 years before I tried it. Fauna Marin balling salts have been out for quite some time now too, and I just started using them about 8 months ago. I are cautious!

However, dosing pumps have been widely used for at least 15-20 years, and who knows when the first idea came upon the hobby...? Back then we jimmy rigged pricey hospital style dosing pumps that ate up huge real estate. Dosing pumps are far from new technology, and are hardly technology at all which is one of the things I like about them. Calcium reactors are much more "technical".

Oh I don't know, I guess there was one benefit to the jugs being empty, I did finish painting my tank room this weekend. (And for the record I don't really like painting either!) Paint the tank room, fill the jugs. Tonight's dilemma will be fill the jugs or get the tile up.

:amen: Simplicity at its best. Thats all I do also and same for Mike on his 150g. I just drip it with my kalk jug but Mike uses a kalk reactor.

I am using a kalk reactor on one tank with a metering pump to drive a nice slow driprate.

To be honest I'm not that super hot on the reactor either. :lol: (When did I become so high maintenance? WTH??) Three reasons: 1) Back in 2003, give or take, a bunch of us Canreefers bought a ridiculous amount of Mrs Wages pickling lime. I've been using the stuff like crazy trying to use it up but I swear it reproduces when I'm not looking because I have yet to finish the stuff!!!!! Anyhow, it's nice and good for 2 weeks or so then, 2) it turns brown and coats the inside of the reactor with its browny grossness. Vinegar cleans it up nice but .. well, it's just another chore to ignore.

And 3) the thing eats Maxijet impellers like crazy. Must be a design flaw, I'm not sure, all I know is I use a MJ600 or MJ900 on it and have to replace the impellers on them every few months.

I'm hoping I can finish those pickling lime jars soon and switch to a nicer kalk mix at some point. Sort of like how I'm waiting to use up my 5g bucket of CaCl from Chemmaster before I do a BRS order of soda ash (figure might as well buy both at the same time). I'm good and logical that way. :neutral:

Judging by the popularity of our dosing packages I would say this is becoming the "in" way of maintaining the levels in the tank. I will never go back to a reactor again.....

Ps, We just received a nice tasty order of Soda Ash.....

hmm... I don't know how you can disagree with what I had to do because I designed and built my reactor to be stable, but Ok :mrgreen:

for the record, I never used a solinoid, probes or any of that new fangles stuff. just did my weekly water tests. you know once and a while I may have to add a bubble per min or take one away, but it was maybe every couple months I have to tweek it so 5 min for two months ..

Ca reactors like anything else flooded the market as the newest and greatest thing, so there were many people making a simple compact design to get it to the marktet and hence we had copys of unstable setups for sale everywhere. Titus had a nice design, but didn't carry one with it, not sure what happened there, but it looked like it would b very stable. I made my own adding a few tweaks of my own and created the monster. I put it at 20 bubbles per min (about 1 min of fiddling) and 5 months later it would still be at 20 bubbles per min. well unless my tank ran out but using a 20lb tank gave me over a years worth of use. since I used to be obsessed with my water tests the longest anything would go with out being checked was 3 days and once a week I recorded my tests in my tank journal to track trends and enable me to know what worked and what didn't when playing with my tank.

Steve

I was disagreeing with:

Kind of self explanitory, no? I think telling everyone that a calcium reactor is set and forget is misleading as most are not set and forget, although lots of people treat them that way, and don't check their parameters until a crash is visually imminent. Is it ok to disagree with you? ;)

In your case, why didn't you have to throttle it up every couple weeks? Why would your demand stay the same?

assuming you have a controller, a ca reactor SHOULD be set and forget aside from the odd testing.

I can see how without a controller, it might get tedious to keep things in line but I would take a controller before just about any other piece of equipment I have so to me having one is a no brainer.

I wasn't implying anything about dosing pumps other than the only reason they are so widely in use RIGHT now is that they are currently in vogue and not neccesarily a better system than a ca reactor...just different and considered progressive at this point in time.

I'll think about it and let you know :wink:

well I account the consistancy of the bubbles to a few things, the first being a large CO2 tank. smaller ones run out faster and you pressure starts to drop a while befor you run out so you end up getting more variation. a larger tank that stays at pretty much its full volume and will give you 1.5 to 2 years worth will be a lot more constant.

the second thing which may have more of an impact than the bottle is the regulator you are using. most of the ones being used in this hobby are true garbage. the cheepest offshore thing they could find as a good regulator would cost more than the reactor. for example a new version of my regulator would be about 350 to 450.00 retail.

as for keeping up with demand in the tank, pure size matters, most places were touting reactors that held 1 jug of media for tanks up to 200 or even 300 gal tanks, with a add on stage up to 4 or 500 gal. they had small pumps, most had no recirc for trapped gas, ect.. the one I designed was big, 4 jugs of media when full, 500 gph recirc with in the unit, gas bubble evacuation, plus a built in water reserve. I used a combanation of high flow and acidic water to desolve minerals. it was big, had a 12 X 20 foot print for the box with two 6" wide towers on the top that were about 12" tall so overall high was about 18".

Steve

The regulator reliability was the big reason I've never liked reactors. Which do you use? I know the aquariumplants.com is supposed to be one of the better hobby ones but I'm guessing yours is not hobby marketed.

Unless you are using some 2 part I know nothing about then I assume you have the same fiddling.
For me I check my alk every couple of months and if necessary will tweak the calcium reactor
....but then I've been using the reactor for 4 yrs and have it pretty much figured out, if the alk is low, a little turn to increase bubble count and a little turn to increase the effluent and it that's all the tweaking I need to do

I run both (BTW there is no option in the poll for both) but each is on its own seperate system.
My sps system has the Balling method running on it and the LPS system has a dual chamber calcium reactor running on it.

The down side to the balling method is it does need to be refilled and it did take quite a while a testing and adjusting to get my levels stable. I refill the alk every 10 days and CA and MG about every 2.5 weeks. For alk though I have it measured out in .5 kg containers so refilling the alk takes about 10 seconds. But now that my levels are stable its absolutely bang on at all times!

CARX is easy, but not as accurate and not as easy for maintaining the exact params i would like. Plus my 6 month old precision marine reg has dumped twice since i set it up.

Same with mine. I've used it for about 8 years now, and I tweak it when I add media, maybe every 4 months? Levels are always consistent, even with heavy growth. To me, this is set and forget...

Theoretically the fiddling with rates due to increasing demand as corals grow is equivalent between parts dosing and reactors. You still have to test regularly and adjust effluent or dose rates as needed. The nice thing about a reactor was that Ca is always in balance with Alk, so if you were inclined to be lazy, you could theoretically get by with testing just Alk instead of testing both Ca and Alk (still a good idea to keep an eye on both, however). This is, however, with one large caveat: your levels needed to be in good proportions to begin with, if they are not, there is no perfect effluent rate to correct that. So where dosing trumps a reactor is the ability to zero in on one parameter and adjust it independent of any other. But once the levels are "in balance" then theoretically there will be no need to zero in on just one parameter.

So at least from the perspective of increasing consumption rates, it sort of balances out, I think.

What's weird (and adds a little to my "reactor nostalgia") is that I didn't get my perfect target numbers running a reactor, but despite that I did get better growth (when things were at their peak) than I ever did with "perfect" numbers using dosing. So there was some intangible benefit to the reactor that I couldn't quite quantify.

Having said that, it wasn't all roses with me and reactors. The biggest complaint I did have was the constant compaction causing cavitation (wow, can I add any more c words to that sentence??) There was a reason I got out of using reactors, nostalgia always lets you look back with rose coloured glasses and I just need to remember that I switched to dosing, not only because I wanted to embrace the idea of dosing but also because I was giving up on reactors (for reasons other than "I don't have to refill it as often"). Another factor that weighed in was I wanted to reduce my reliance on CO2 because I had a feeling David Suzuki would not have approved of my CO2 usage (I doubt he still approves of my hobby mind you. Darn it all. Oh well. Baby steps.)

Anyhow given the #'s I find it interesting that there are still lots of people who use reactors. This has been a fantastic discussion so far and very enlightening (and thought provoking) so if you've participated, I thank you. :) Please keep it going. :)

@PFoster - actually there should have been an option for both. Sorry if this wasn't clear in my original post but you can actually select both options as this was meant as a multiple choice poll.

cheers :)

On a totally unrelated note, I got my tile up last night. Alas, the dosing vessels are still taunting me with their emptiness.

And still no pics. I couldn't get a clear view of the progress from your basement window last night. Quit leaving me hangin!

gobytron mentioned that dosing setups are in vogue at this point.

I actually think that controllers and dosing pumps have improved a lot in recent years, and that is the reason for their increasing popularity.

How have calcium reactors improved?

Mitch

:lol:How can you improve on something that already works perfectly...

and not to say that being in vogue makes it an inferior technology, just that from my point of view this is why the lopsided usage between the two systems.

The other thing I like about my CA reactor that I forgot about until now is the fact that you can add a little extra media like zeo mag or carbon and reduce your maintenance even more...

My doser is nearly maintenance free and deadly accurate. I trim the fingernails and wash it in the shower.

mine is a full sized one from a welding setup for shielding gas. it is rated in CuFt/min so it is an actualy flow meter not a pressure regulator.

sounds like a small differance but depending on your set up a pressure regulator (which is what is used on most CO2 reactors) will let in more or less CO2 as long as the pressure is the same, causing your bubble count to change. all it take to change this is a little change in the internal pressure of the reactor or even water evaporating out of the bubbler.

with mine it couldn't care what the pressure is as it will always let the same volume/time into the reactor so I get no changes. you can get a cheep flow meter for about 100 bucks but the deicent ones start at 200 and up.

I also made both chambers in my reactor upflow which got rid of the problems Tony was mentioning.

Steve

Delphinus, yeah i did actually choose both when i voted on the poll but it doesnt show it in the results thats all.

Also have you tried adding the different trace elements?
I have seen a difference in both growth rates and color from my tank to a friends tank that uses everything the same, save the trace elements. Yeah, yeah I know its a different system so that on its own will cause growth and color differences but still.

Denial is a nice place to visit.

I go there frequently too....:lol:

Mitch

Oooohhh...we're gonna have some A.R.M.-wrestlin' going on here soon.

Saweeet.

Obviously.:wink:

You know, I tried that too on a couple different units I had. I can't remember what the issue was but it wasn't a complete slam dunk either. Upflow does make more sense, for one you can do away with the CO2 recirc line. I wonder if it was I was losing too much CO2 into the tank and I was noticing a depressed pH. Might have been something else. I can't actually remember now. :neutral:

Good one! Very Witty!

In the end I think it all comes down to money when the "set and forget" feature is added. :p

Hmmm, very interesting. Thanks for elaborating. The cost of this thing would be rather substantial though I would be thinking (much more than a basic reactor or dosing system), and take up a lot of real estate. The "set and forget" feature is pretty sweet though. How often were you testing parameters? What variance did you find in that time?

Oh you bet! I fiddle with my dosers at least as much as I fiddled with my reactors in the past. I think this dilemma in both methods would be significantly reduced provided a controller is used. I have never run a controller. I prefer fiddling with the dosers than the Ca reactor simply because each parameter can be fiddled with separately. I always found alkalinity to drop quicker than calcium when using a reactor - I was always dosing alkalinity separately.

I remember why the upflow mods failed for me - it was too hard on the pumps as it must have been just a little too restrictive on the intake side. They would get super hot, one got so hot the casing of the pump melted (warped and started leaking water all over).

I guess definitely something you want the reactor to be designed for rather than arbitrarily switching the input/output lines on the pump.

:eek:, um dude, you had something else going on there, what kind of pumps?

Steve

well cost wide, it cost me 100 bucks in pumps and plastic to build the reactor. I already had the regulator, paid 65 bucks for a used co2 extinguisher with a new valve and hydrostat, and say 50 bucks for misc and things I forgot about.. so way cheeper than buying a cheep reactor setup.

I did a full test once a week and never found much of a variance at all I had a tone of SPS which grew like stink, so I was pounding the co2 reactor already so that might be why there was no variation.

Steve

How do you add carbon to a ca reactor?
Carbon should be changed out after 3 weeks or so. That just means more frequent maintenance to the reactor.

Mitch

I switched from a reactor a few years ago and have never looked back. My reactor had some issues and I was blowing through 10lbs of CO2 in 6 weeks and that was with a solenoid and new needle valve. I tried everything to fix it and finally just chucked the whole thing in favor of a dosing pump. 3 clean plastic 4L milk jugs and I just dump a couple cups (or whatever the dosage is) in the container, fill half with water, shake the living crap out of it to dissolve and fill it to the top with water and I'm done. I'm not quite sure what you're doing Tony that is so labour intensive/exhausing/less fun than chipping cat turds off the floor. I don't even bake the baking soda and it keeps my alk at the "good enough" level unless I feel like buggering around with it. I think the 4L containers last about 3 weeks or so and keep my parameters much more stable than the reactor ever did.

Um, silly question but wtf is soda ash?

Something you get from smoking soda?

It's from Bulk Reef Supply. Aklalinity supplement. Mixes very easily. Good stuff.

Thanks Lance :biggrin:

Mag drives .. went through 2 or 3 of them then switch the reactor back to downflow and stopped wrecking pumps. Yeah, weird, I know.

I personally do everything manually. I use to premix all my calcium, DKH, MG, Str and so forth, but stopped even doing that about 4 months or so ago.

Now I have a chamber in my sump, located near the starting phase of the sump. this chamber sits in the water about 3/4 in, and the bottom is slatted. In the bottom of this container, I put about 1/2 inch of course foam (like what is used in reactors) to cover the slats and provide a simple barrier.

On a daily basis, I measure out my recipe of dry goods (All now Seachem) and then dump the goods in the chamber. What happens is that the water flow around the chamber (especially underneath) draw out the dosing's, and as it leaches out, fresh water also goes in to replace the saturated water and the process keeps happening. Eventually the dry goods are gone.

What is nice about this, is that I don't have to fuss with premixing, and I find my parameters to be perfect with very minimal swings.

Just another way of doing things, I find this solution to work well for me.

Weird. I've been running the same MAG 3 for 8 years on mine, still going strong.

I am wondering if there is a check valve built into his system.

Steve