Well, since I did up a little write up about how I made fish food I figure maybe I'll do one up demonstrating how I mix Randy's Two-Part for dosing Baking Soda (Alkalinity) and Calcium (From littlesilvermax).
Alkalinity
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1. The first thing I do is go out and buy baking soda of course. Easy enough. You can get 2 kg (4.4lb) box from just about any grocery store for roughly $4.99. That comes out to like $1.13 a pound. Not bad.
2. I then spread the baking soda out on a sheet and bake it in the oven at 350(F) for about an hour (or more).
You can't really over bake this stuff. Randy has a couple of recipes. One that calls for baking and one that does not. Obviously I am using the one that requires baking.
3. After I've baked a batch (i'll usually do like 6 - 8 kgs at a time), I store it in a huge tub.
4. Okay, so on to the mixing. To make up a gallon (3.78L) of this stuff requires
2 1/4 cups of
baked baking soda and
14 1/4 cups of water.
I put my water into a pot on the stove and turn the stove on low to warm up the water. This helps with the dissolving
I then pull out my trusty fish blender. This also helps with the mixing A LOT! Trust me! Otherwise you are stirring by hand, very very briskly for a long long long long (did I mention long?) time..
Even with the blender you still don't want to poor it all in at once. Instead I tap the cup of baking soda on the edge of the pot to drop in a little bit at a time while blending/mixing/stirring.
After a few minutes I'm all done and just poor in into a 2L storage bottle. Easy peasy!
Calcium
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Mixing up calcium additive is more or less the same approach, except there is no baking involved! To make a gallon of additive I mix
2 1/2 cups of calcium (purchased in bulk from littlesilvermax/chemmaster) with
13 1/2 cups of water. I don't even heat up the water when mixing up calcium actually. Just dump both water and calcium together into a container, blend/stir/mix with my hand blender and not long after I'll have 1 gallon of calcium additive ready for dosing.
