New Calcium reactor questions

Ok, so I got everything hooked up and running. Had a few leaks to chase down. One little tip for everyone, the standard 1/4" RO line you buy off the local shelfs does not fit octopus reactors. It won't seal correctly in whatever size metric John Guest fittings are in the reactor. Luckily between all the crap I have around here with that type of line I was able to scavange a chuck to get what I needed.

Now what? How do I know what PH to run in the reactor. Right now I have it connected to the APEX to turn the CO2 on at 7 and off at 6.8. Funny thing is it appears I have a slight leak in the solenoid and its actually just enough to hold a constant ~6.8 in the reactor. Later in the day when the PH of the tank water rises the solenoid might kick on ita coupe times. I need to get it fixed, but for now it works. I figured that was the high side of the PH scale, but how do I know if I need to take it lower? I checked the starting point of my Alk (tank) and its a little on the low side. Does the reactor maintain levels, or will it also bring them up? In other words should I dose to the desired levels and then adjust the reactor to maintain those levels, or can I run more/stronger effluent to raise the levels and then back them down? If the alk levels drop should I lower the PH, or speed up the effluent? How fast do I run the effluent to start with? Right now its a very fast drip, any faster and it would be closer to a continuos flow I would say.

 

Thanks man. I'll have to decipher all that before I go about adjusting too much.

 

If the calculator is accurate it looks like I am not too far off. Right now the effluent is ~50mL/min flow and dKH of 14.5. It looks like I'll need to get a little higher dKH from the effluent to maintain what I was dosing with 2 part. Now being as how I am at the high side for pH (6.8-7), is my thinking correct that I can just increase CO2 to lower the pH in the reactor slightly to increase the dKH of the effluent?

I wasn't going to tinker with too much yet. I was more or less looking for some good starting points. It looks like I am a little on the weak side now, but not really too far off. I actually probably tend to make changes a little slower than I should/could just for the fact I don't want to overshoot what I'm looking for. I have a feeling dialing this thing in isn't going to be too hard at all. /DesktopModules/ActiveForums/themes/_default/emoticons/smile.gif

 

Is there anything Octopus that is not metric?