Ok, I am new to saltwater. Being crazy I setup a 480 gallon reef with an additional 100 gallon sump as my first tank. All is going well except one issue : I can;t get my calcium high enough.
I am currently running a kalkreactor (deltec) and a kalkwasser dosing unit (deltec) into my sump. I can get my calcium to about 380 and KH at 11-12, but the PH is low at 7.9-7.95 If I crank up the kalkreactor any, I don;t ggain anything on the calcium levels, and the PH drops more.
The issue seems to be I don't have enough evaporation to dose ro/DI top-off through the kalkwasser at a large enough rate. As an experiment, I made a 2.5 gallon jug of saturated calcium hydroxide solution up and dripped it into the tank over a 24 hr period. It almost worked in that my PH went to 8.05 and my Calcium went to 410, both just a bit lower than I wanted. I figured that the 2.5 gallons I dripped was offsetting my evaporation and I hence got less RO/DI water to purge through my kalkwasser. If Ic ould dose this much more calcium hydroxide without reducing mykalkwasser, I think it would work great.
Also, what I don't want is to make up a 2.5 gallon jug everyday, I'm lazy. O, and I don't have room to put a 50 gallon tank over my sump for dripping calcium hydroxidem and that would defeat the purpose of automatically dosing anyways.
Is there a way to get more flow through my kalkwasser? I would need to create another 2-3 gallons per day of evaporation to do this.
is there a system or dosing unit out there that will does straight calcium hydroxide powder to my sump? If I am dosing liquid, it offsets my evaporation and reduces the kalkwasser efficiency also.

John