Calcium and Alcalinity

buckeye88

buckeye88

Member
I tested my calcium and alkalinity and found that my calcium is very high (600ppm) and my alkalinity is a little low (107.4 ppm KH or 6 dKH).
What is the problem with having high calcium? I do use purple up and reef cristals along with kent essential elemaents so I'm going to stop dosing for a while until it lowers to about 450-500. What can high calcium do to my tank?
What can I do to raise my alkalinity? What does alkalinity do exactly? I read that partial water changes can raise alkalinity but I do a 5% weekly.
 
rtspeed

rtspeed

Member
okay lets start with your tank size?
High calcium will not effect much but will give you a snow effect in the water, the reason its high is you are adding to much stuff. I would stop the purple up all together as it is a calcium sup to help coraline growth. The kent essential is a good product but use with care.
As for the ALK you can use some PH Buffer to get that up to par.
 
interex

interex

Member
yeah stop using purple up the only time its ok IMO is when you are seting up the tank no fish or coral so you cant hurt any thing.
 
buckeye88

buckeye88

Member
Yeah, I was extremley disappointed with the purple up. I expected there to be some awesome explosion of coralline in my tank but that didn't happen. I don't have any snow yet so hopefully things are ok but like I said, I'm done with the purple up. I wonder though, since I'm doing weekly water changes and using reef crystals rather than reguler sea salt, will I still even need the essential elements?
 
interex

interex

Member
no you dont really need to add any thing to the tank with weekly water changes that is if you dont have lots of hard coral that is killing your calcium but i dont think you are having that problem ............
 
buckeye88

buckeye88

Member
As far as a stock list goes, in my 16 gal I have
2 - green reef chromis
1 - six line wrass
1 - yellow watchman goby
1 - hawiian strawberry crab
1 - cleaner shrimp
hermit crabs
nassarius snails
turbo snails
and for corals
a leather toadstool
yellow polyps (all over the place)
green star polyp
ricordia mushroom
some sort of green mushrooms (one of which is huge!)
a small zoa frag
candy cane coral
I think that's everything + about 20 Lb live roch ans a 2" sand bed
 
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