What are you dosing?

I've used a few different two parts that are commercially bought I really like B-Ionic if I go that way. Right now I am using the bulk reef supply additives as you can buy the powders and mix them yourself so it ends up cheaper.

I use seachem reef builder (powder) for alk and red sea magnesium and calcium. Seachem's bicarbonate to carbonate mix is better than most others and causes less issues from what I've seen. Red sea has the proper mix of sulfate to chloride while offering a better price point to others. Their calcium is high quality too. They all mix well and don't have any nasty trace elements. Other stuff I don't like to use (like baking soda, Epsom salts) because I've seen corals react poorly to them. They have more bad trace elements that may be harmful when built up in our systems with dosing.

Edited by phys - January 30 2016 at 3:59am

I use the Number 2 recipe from Randy Holmes-Farley. http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-02/rhf/

Right now I'm dosing kalkwasser because I had it on hand and adding two part as needed.

Fat

Electro4112 wrote:  Hey marcos   and jackie they also sell B-ionic by the 5 gallon...

BRS 2 part as well. Always mixes easily and completely. Love the stuff.

210 gallon uses Kalkwasser stirrer and use BRS two part with Fauna Balling Light Trace 1,2 and 3 added.

45 gallon  uses BRS two part with Fauna Balling Light Trace 1,2 and 3 added

The 120 I am setting up will have calc reactor and make up with 2 part.

I use very little two part on the 210 gallon at this point because of the Kalk Stirrer. It adds about 2500 Ml a day to the system. Doser feeds the reactor and overflows into the sump. I like the BRS two part as it mixes easily and is a know. I have not tried the DYI 2 part.

What do you consider manual dosing?

I think a large portion of the users responding on this thread have controllers and use parastaltic pumps to dose automatically. The main reason that most choose this option is for stability. Dosing in small amounts throughout the day ensures no spikes in the system parameters like there are if you dump a measuring cup of 2 part in a couple of times a day. Spikes in pH and Alkalinity from hand dosing can be harsh to SPS and some LPS corals and they will not do well in that setup.

Reactors are along the same lines but can take some of the guess work out of the amount of each supplement to does because they (in theory) break down the media in the exact amounts needed by our corals.

Jabao DP-4 is an inexpensive 4 channel dosing pump that works very well and is programmable. So you don't need a separate controller for the whole team. They can be picked up for less than $100 and each channel can be programmed individually. You should check them out.

Thanks guys! I'm ALL about Amazon Prime!!

In previous coral farms I dosed manually because I could, I had the time to dose. In my most recent coral farm, I had more difficulty keeping Alk where it needed to be for the larger quantity of stony coral I was producing. I got tired of frequent dosing and testing. I was adding about 1-2 liters of homemade Alkalinity solution every week**. Setting up a single doser on an appliance timer to deliver my homemade Alkalinity solution was good for me and good for the coral.