Ca Low Alk High

HI,
I had a very bad experience that I wanted to share for anyone new to saltwater, if you starting a new tank be sure to get a good CA Kit and a good ALk kit, if you don't you will have problems. If your coraline starts to die its a warning of impending doom. your pH will go up the Alk will go up and CA will drop off and you may see white forming on everything in your tank.
You can try to dilute the problems away with frequent water changes but the Coraline algae you love to see growing maybe using up your calcium faster than the tank is using the Alk this leads low Ca that can't be easily fixed you will know cause your tank will be covered with Calcium Carbonate precip.
I have found a article that goes into great depth for a newbie about the problems that may occur.
Here's the article this web page I have printed about 1/2 of the articles and have the others on my bookmarks.

Take some time to read.

A Simplified Guide to the Relationship Between Calcium, Alkalinity, Magnesium and pH by Randy Holmes-Farley - Reefkeeping.com

This PH/ALk/Ca relation is critical to understand or you may have lots of that calcium precip and a very low calcium that can't be easily resolved with water changes.
I fixed mine by dripping slowly three quarts of that seltzer water and about 30 pH checks over two days.
And that was after a 50 % water change. yea its a battle.:-[
Doug

 

Here's a good calculator that goes with that article.

'Reef Chemistry Calculator FV'

 

The worst news is that Randy retired from his forum and won't be available for help in the future.
Maybe someone will archive all his writings to save in case RC has a crash and looses everything, including the articles on the Reefkeeping magazine.
It's a shame just how much material has been lost in the last ten years when sites crash or have been taken down.
Randy's information would probably be the most devastating to loose of any one contributor on the internet. (IMO that is)

 

Randy is associated with reef central forums and can answer your questions their if you have to contact him!
Yes you can't really look at alk/calcium/pH without looking at all three interchangeably...a change to one will definitely affect the others!!!!
High alkalinity leads to low calcium and vice versa and so on...
Two part additives of alk and calcium will help plus their other ways of getting around this problem!!

 

Randy retired from his forum as of Monday March 5th!

 

Thanks rayjay...good to know! I enjoyed communicating with him on various chemistry questions for water! He will be missed, however their is such a variety of sites and references to find info on chemistry!

 

Nice chart

HI,
I wonder if we are allowed to back up those articles to CD or DVD in case we lose the system, that way we can put it back after the rebuild. I have many of them on a 2 gig pen drive for reference.
That chart is excellent for fixing those imbalances, I remember when I was bragging about all that coraline algae I had and one of the members mentioned it can be hard on CA , I had no Idea.
Doug