I AM NOT CLAIMING TO BE AN EXPERT but some of the info on that link seems wrong. First off do not start at 50 to 60 ml per min. Go to the lowest setting of 35 ml per min or even lower. 2nd If you want to increase calcium and alkalinity do not increase the bubble count. You want to get the solenoid to stay open for longer periods which means you want to bring the PH in the reactor down very slowly ideally getting it to a stable ph. The more CO2 you add the lower the PH will get faster. The key word is faster, meaning you will still decrease PH levels by adding a little CO2 it will just take longer. I like to use a setting of 6.6 to 6.5. CO2 on at 6.6 and off at 6.5. Once you are within that range you are melting the media at a decent rate not too fast and not too slow. Allot of people are able to dial in a reactor without a PH probe and controller. They do this by measuring the PH level of the effluent. Once you really get the hang of it you will understand that it's totally possible. Anyway this is how I would start.
Get your water parameters to where you want by them manually dosing. Calcium reactors maintain levels they don?t increase them. Because of the ratio added by a reactor, 20 ppm calcium for each 2.8 dKH of alkalinity, you will not be able to use it to get any significant boost to calcium without alkalinity getting too high. Although calcium reactors are set and forget as your corals grow you will have to keep testing and manually increase levels as needed especially on a new system where you are constantly adding new pieces.
Connect everything
Allot of people like to rinse the media first
Run without CO2 for a day
record your parameters
Start the effluent drip at 35 ml per min. I use a 10ml Hanna glass test tube with a stop watch and then multiply to see how much ML I am dosing per min.
Start the bubble rate at 4 seconds per bubble. Not 4 bubble per seconds. Count 4 seconds between each bubble. It will initially take a while for the PH to come down since the tank water PH coming into the reactor should be above 8.0.
Wait 24 hours and check your parameters. You will be mainly be monitoring the alkalinity levels as they fluctuate the most and are consumed the quickest. Because of the ratio added by a reactor, 20 ppm calcium for each 2.8 dKH of alkalinity, generally if you dial in according to KH then calcium will be fine. I you KH levels are the same as they were 24 hours ago and did not increase or decrease then you are all set. If they aren't you will increase/ decrease the effluent level 10 to 20 ml at a time.
Once you figure out how much effluent you need per min (this can take weeks to dial in sometimes) you move on to the bubble count. The first time I did this it took me more than a month to get it right and finally understand how it all works.
The amount of water being fed to the reactor from the tank isn't so important because the effluent line has a micro valve which is used to adjust the effluent dosage. That valve basically valves back the entire feed line to the reactor anyway. However the more effluent you dose per min the more high PH tank water enters the reactor so more CO2 will be needed to decrease the PH within the reactor and melt media.
I use an
apex controller which has a feature of logging the PH on a graph. I use it to see how long my solenoid stays open for. Like I mentioned before there are reactors that don't even have PH probe holes drilled into the lids for controlling CO2. Once you know how to do this you don't even need the controller you should be able to get to a level where the effluent PH is always the same. Never the less technology makes it easier for us. I honestly don't know all of the exact reasons but I have read in a few places that the longer the solenoid stays open the better. One reason is that there is less wear on the solenoid because it isn't opening and closing all day. I also noticed that when CO2 is added at the slowest possible rate I don't get any excess CO2 in the top of the reactor which causes allot of air pockets that limit the performance of the reactor and add CO2 to the tank which brings down the tanks overall PH. As long as the effluent gets down to the 6.5 set point and doesn't go above the 6.6 you are good to go.
Hobbyist say things like ?running the reactor hard? They do that with low PH and high effluent. What they are doing is dosing very high amounts of very calcium and alkalinity rich effluent. If in order to keep up with your systems demand you need to adjust the reactor to go all the way up to 120 ML per min (basically micro valve open all the way) and even then it isn't keeping up, then your last resort before upgrading to a larger reactor is lowering the PH setting to 6.4 to 6.5 or even 6.3 to 6.4 which causes most medias to become muddy and melt fairly quickly. Once you do that you will need considerably more CO2 to keep up with such a high effluent demand at such a low PH. That's also how increasing the bubble count increases the calcium and KH levels but should only be used as a last resort.
I really HTH,
Adam
