Yet another kalk reactor snowstorm

[Cobalt]

My kalk reactor is one week old, hooked up to a timer to run for only one hour a night at 4am and is also wired to a float. I have a 28g nano cube. woke at 6:15 this morning and the tank was so cloudy you couldn't see an inch in. The tank could not have received more than 1/3 of a gallon of (apparently) saturated kalkwasser. Even though it is filled via a dosing pump and is stirred by a magnetic stirrer on the bottom. I have too much kalk in the reactor (first mistake) as the saturation line is about 5/8 to the top.

 

I read the other post from may about kalk reactor staying on and that user dosed baking soda to raise the alk. Will low alk kill inverts?

 

I paniced and changed 30% of the water (luckily I madea batch of saltwater the night prior) and dosed 50mL of distilled vinegar to lower my pH. article about vinegar to lower pH. I do not have a pH test kit, my aquacontroller jr with pH probe arrives wednesday. DOH!

 

I will go home at lunch and perform another 25% water change, I left a powerhead and heater in my bucket that is getting DI water slowly.

 

One confirmed deatch, my tuxedo urchin. I got him as an water quality indicator and unfornately I killed him within a week. (sad)

 

I saw two snails on their backs as well. My flame scallop is opened up and appears alive but stressed. clams have a slime coat and one the slime is white from the kalk...

 

do i need to do anything else besides the lunch hour 25% water change? Do I need to add alkalinity? What parameters should I test? I assume high pH would kill many of denitrifing bacteria, will my tank need to cycle again?

[impur]

I think the addition of vinegar was just too much. The pH was driven way up, then the WC with vinegar drove it way down. Too much swing. Just do a 25% WC, add some carbon and wait it out. Try to siphon out any undissolve kalk. You might add a filter with a mesh bag or some filterfloss.

[Cobalt]

thanks for the quick reply. You're right. I guess I added vinegar after the first water change because it made no impact on the visibility of the water whatsover, so visually it seemed to have no effect, and I don't have a pH test kit so I was freaking out... time to wait it out.

[Nyles]

Also if your going to stir I would do it for 60 seconds or so, no reason to saturate for an hour, when you get your ac jr you can program the top off not to run for an hour after the kalk stirs so this wont happen again.

[Cobalt]

i am now thinking the pH may have hit 8.6 or higher and that caused a massive precipitation of my Ca and Alk. Prior it was 400 and 10. Now I'm guessing over the week I have been dosing kalk as topoff it slowly raised the pH to the point of precipitation. Hence the snowstorm. Does than change any thing?

 

as an update, i changed another 5 gallons at lunch and this evening I can see across the tank now.

 

all my SPS appear to be ok, but I have read that they may begin RTNing in the coming days from similar scenerios with others.

 

i bought a siphon and will try to remove settled kalk... running carbon and filter floss

 

nyles, i wasn't clear, my reactor has a built in timer, runs 1 minute every 60 minutes. The 1 hour timer at 4am is for the power to my dosing pump, so all topoff occurs at 4am. This setup worked fine for the last week, so now I am thinking saturated kalk did not enter the tank, rather the pH was raised to the point of precpitation.

[Nyles]

There is nothing you can do about that, myself personally only thing I have experienced with that is precipitation of phos (a good thing) and the SPS may brown. Try and take it slow and get your levels stabile.

 

As fart as the last comment, saturated kalk (ph of 12 DKH) if you dosed all your kalk top off at once (in my tank its about 2 gallons) it would throw my ph through the roof every day. I would suggest you run your top off normally but stop it for an hour after you stir the kalk. So stir daily and turn off top off for that hour after, that will create a much more stabile environment. 12 DKH dump everyday from a kalk reactor is too much.