Seeking help from dosing gurus
 

Well so recently I had to start dosing alk since it would fall to 5dkh otherwise. So my plan is like this:

At morning, the alk is around 8 so I dose 6ml of soda ash mix to get it to around 8.5. At night, it falls to around 7.3dkh so I dose 12ml to bring it up to 8.3. This is a content trend that I have noticed and I am following it.

Alongside, my Ca drops to around 380 before water change so I don't dose anything; just replace Ca to 440ish with WC.

My Mg seems to be going down (its at 1260ppm now) and I have started dosing magnesium mg from taylor aquatics. But funny thing is, it says to put in cap full per 20 gallon daily. Doesn't say how much it will increase. So I dosed a capful and the mg stayed at 1260ppm (tested like after 10mins). I again dosed another cap full and it is still at 1260ppm :O I am confused; does mg takes a longer time to increase or the cap full is just too low?

P.S. I am using salifert to test the big 3.

This testing before and after dosing (alk is now fine) is kinda driving me nuts. I am thinking of moving to 50% weekly WC along with dosing Alk. Testings are making this hobby expensive :S

So I humbly request dosing gurus to help me out with this situation :)

No dosing guru online? :(

Seeking help from dosing gurus
 

After having the same problem with determining Mg concentration and dosing requirements of Taylor Aquatics, I asked Brad (Taylor) what the concentration was (I live a short drive from where he used to work). He wouldn't tell me, but he said it was comparable to other liquid commercial products. I wasn't too keen on his answer and despite wanting to support a local business, I have switched over to Brightwell Aquatics products which lists concentration in detail. You can probably safely assume T.A. Mg is about the same concentration as any of the ones listed on the reef calculators. I think you will be surprised how much Mg you need to add to raise it. Personally, I use dry anhydrous Mg.
As for dosing alk, seems like you have that dialed in!
Ca... you can let it fluctuate like that but it will cost your corals a bit of energy to adjust to the swings in concentration. This is energy they would normally be able to put into growth and regeneration. If you want your corals to be healthier and grow faster (as funny as it sounds you actually might not want them to grow faster) you can add Ca between WCs to keep it more constant.
Regarding cost of testing: it is more expensive when you are learning but gets cheaper once you are dialed in. Depending on cost of WCs, it can be cheaper to do more of them and less testing. I think you will find once you are dialed in you will test every couple of weeks or even less. I test when things don't look right. For me, that's every couple of months. This slows growth, but I am not too worried about that. They seem to grow plenty fast :) personally, if you are standing at the tank dosing already, I would dose Ca and Mg at the same time.
Good luck!


Dan

Just takes a while to type with my thumb on my iPhone ;)


Dan

Thank you so much Dan :)

I am a bit worried about the drop of 1dkh per day in my 20 gallon (filled with 50+ corals) but I guess its just the environment that got created in my tank.

I was thinking of Ca dosing, maybe like increase it by 20ppm or something in the middle of the week.

I thought I would go away without dosing but I guess I proved that one can "overstock" corals too :P

My corals are growing like crazy and I wouldn't mind some slow growth :P I just need the colors.

Thanks for typing that detailed reply with iphone. Typing in such "small" screen can be tough....you might want to move to something "bigger" ;) Galaxy Note perhaps? ;)

colors will come with extra feeding - if your tank is nutrient starved then you will get dull colors. It sounds like your alk, calc, mag are within reasonable ranges so i would look to feeding to help with that.

I don't like ULNS so there are some nutrients but not enough to brown out SPS. I do feed them once every week and I dose amino acid.

your banner signature says 0 phophates and 0 nitrates... thats a ULNS:mrgreen:

Ah clever :lol:

A drop of 1dKh/day is consistent with what I would expect from your description of your system. I am getting 1-2 dKh drop/day in all of my tanks. I dose about 750ml of dKh/day total between all of them to keep up. Once you determine how much Ca and Mg you need to add for every 1 dKh, you can just test dKh and add the appropriate ratio of each. Then it's just a matter of testing for the others much less often.
Dan
PS-Typing on the computer now ;).