The LAST big upgrade

[Delphinus]

As far as making your dosing batches more concentrated ... I don't see a problem with this unless you are already near or at the saturation point.

To give you an example, on my 280g (which I thought until now was reasonably hungry for Ca and Alk), I make up 1 gallon of Ca and 1 gallon of soda ash using 2 cups of each to 1 gallon. This is pretty close to the saturation point for the Alk in particular. It takes a long time to mix into solution (to the point I just have a powerhead mixing it all the time). However if I leave the lid off just a little askew, that little bit of evaporation that happens is enough to supersaturate the solution within a few days and it then flash freezes (or whatever the term is to cause a dissolved solution to precipitate out en masse, it's been too long for me since my chem courses so I don't remember. Plus, I kind of have a mental block because organic chem pretty much destroyed me as a human being. Stupid Chem350...). Anyhow. It's kind of neat because it looks like ice crystals but the whole bucket will be in this state and I pretty much have to dump it and mix anew at that point. So I don't think one would get much more than 2 cups of soda ash into 1 gallon.

As an aside, I'm using Eli's soda ash and calcium chloride, maybe that stuff is more concentrated than the BRS stuff. I dunno, I just find it too cost prohibitive and inconvenient to order from BRS when Eli is right here in the city, so I based that choice on convenience rather than how much I appeared to be dosing.

Also as an aside that 1 gallon of solution, assuming no weird flash freeze events, lasts me about 2 weeks. I dose 3 times per day of each using cycles in the 45 minute mark and using 1.1ml/min and 1.0ml/min dosing pumps so I guess I could probably do a better job of estimating how often I replace but it's longer than one week. I could not imagine having to mix the stuff daily, there's no way I would tolerate that myself more than a couple days before completely losing patience with that..