Question about dosing kalk.

[chris009]

I'm reading and it seems like the basic idea is to replace all evaporated water with kalk mix. So, suppose my tank loses 5 gallons of water a day. I would need to mix 5 gallons of kalk water to dose into the tank. Why can't I just dose 1 gallon of concentrated kalk water and add another 4 without it? It just seems like larger tanks would have to dose alot of kalk if they had to replace each gallon with a gallon of kalk.

 

[mfp1016]

The idea behind kalk is to maintain ca and alk. Maintaing these does not mean replacing all evaporated water with kalk. If I were you I would test to see how much your Ca goes down in the course of a day; then use one of many online calculators to determine how much kalk you should be using. Also, many people strongly discourage having kalk setup as your evaporation combatant because if something were to fail you would be adding a lot of kalk to your tank.

 

[viper_930]

The kalk solution would be fully saturated at about 2 level teaspoons of calcium chloride per gallon. It can't get more concentrated than that unless you also add vinegar in the solution. The amount of kalk you dose would more depend on how much your tank uses, as mpf mentioned, and not completely on how much you need to top off. You can vary the concentration of the kalk in the solution to fit your evaporation needs though, but again not more than 2 teaspoons/gallon.