Ways of doing kalk--can you tell me?

[Whatigot]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

No need to drip it into an ATO reservoir.

The reason you want to drip it into your tank is that you want to limit the pH swing you'd get by dumping a large uncontrolled amount of kalk into the tank. But if you're using an ATO, you can just have kalk powder directly into your reservoir and a little powerhead to mix it up, because (presumably) the ATO is already topping up your tank in small increments over the course of a day.

You can use an IV dripper, or even just a water jug with an irrigation needle valve somehow.. whatever you can set up will work. So long as the drip rate doesn't exceed the evaporation rate you can more or less set it to whatever you want. Start slow and increase as needed (without exceeding the evap rate) - e.g., if you find your levels are dropping then increase the drip rate, wait a few days and test again.

Finding a steady rate can be a challenge.

I use a DIY kalk reactor (mixer) using a dosing pump feed a steady slow drip rate and a powerhead on a timer to mix the kalk/water. I just add more kalk than is needed so to get a supersaturated solution and top up the power once per week, and maybe take the whole thing apart for rinsing and cleaning about maybe once per month.

I would really like to see pics of your diy kalk drip..
sounds like a great system.

[Delphinus]

Sorry, totally forgot about this thread. I'll try to take some pictures of the setup tonight and post back.

[Whatigot]

awesome man.
Looking forward to it for sure...
Thanks very much, all us newbs appreciate it.

[Delphinus]

Ok, crappy picture, sorry, battery was dying on the camera and the tank lights had already gone off when I remembered to take this photo .. but here is a basic overview. When the time comes that I need to clean out the kalk reactor I'll try to remember to get some closeups of the design.

It's a DIY mixer but I didn't make it, another Canreefer did and I just lazily bought it off him. So it's a DIYBBSE (do-it-yourself-but-by-someone-else).



RO/DI enters from my main 50g RO/DI reservoir into the smaller bucket you see in the back. There's just a humidifier float valve in the bucket so that it doesn't overflow. The dosing pump (piston style) sits on top of the bucket and lifts water from the bucket and pushes it through the reactor. This style of pump will pump against a head pressure of up to 150psi so even a kalk clog in the reactor output shouldn't slow down the process. I bought this pump off another Canreefer, every now and again a dosing pump will come up for sale.

Anyhow RO/DI is pumped at a rate of about 1 drop per second into the kalk reactor. I just trial-and-errored the flowrate to make sure I don't add kalk into the tank at a rate that exceeds evaporation.

The kalk reactor is an 4" acrylic tube with a powerhead attached for mixing. The powerhead is on a timer, runs for about 1/2 hour per day (I just use a mechanical timer, I could run it for less time but I'd have to use an electronic timer instead and I'm too cheap, this works fine). So every week I add a few tablespoons of kalk powder to the reactor, the powerhead keeps it mixed up. There is more powder added than can be dissolved at once, so there is constantly kalk powder at the bottom. This keeps the liquid at a supersaturated state so that it's not really getting diluted as more RO/DI gets added.

I used to just use a powerhead to feed the RO/DI and a needlevalve on the output to throttle back the flow, this worked OK except the needlevalve was prone to clogging and needed to be cleaned every couple of days.

I also used to just have the reactor inline on the float valve on the sump. Again the weakness was that the valve was prone to clogging, also, had to remember to take it offline when doing water changes otherwise it would dump a lot of kalk into the tank when the water level was down in the sump.