Increasing calcium and alkalinity in my tank

I started to dose kalkwasser in my tank to help maintain my calcium and alkalinity levels while also increasing my pH slightly since its a bit low. Kalkwasser is white powder that when mixed with water has a high calcium, pH, and alkalinity level it is basically pickling lime water that our grandparents would use to can vegetables but the pickling lime water is very hard to find these days.
In the picture below the tube on the right is the tube used to drip the kalkwasser into my sump. Attached to that line is a plastic piece that allows me to control the speed that my kalkwasser drips at much like an IV at the hospital. To start the kalkwasser all I have to do is blow in the tube on the left and the kalk drips out the tube on the right.
The only problem with this is the kalkwasser tends to settle over a couple of hours and you need to stir it. I remembered that I have an old hard drive (which have powerful magnets inside that help spin the harddrive) and some high strength magnets encased in plastic. So I made myself a magneting stiring device, only problem is the harddrive died on me when i placed the kalkwasser on top.





Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Fish tank update

Well, I am a horrible blogger, I never write. Well here's an update on my tank since you've last visited in May. As you know I had new tank syndrome and received a diatom bloom. That diatom bloom turned into a cyano bloom much to my fault and laziness I topped my tank off with fresh water from the tap. To the non-reefers here, that is bad because it contains all kinds of impurities. A cyano bloom is a film of a red algae and it looks horrid; I battled that for about 2 months by picking it out by hand and by dosing red slime remover in my tank. I eventually won, and as a prize I bought a pump for my tank. Part of the reason why it took so long to get rid of was because I had almost no water flow in the tank which all kinds of algae like. That pump increased my water flow but I then ran into another algae bloom, this time the good old green hair algae that everyone battles.

To date, I still have not beaten the green hair algae. I bought a seahare last week to mow down the algae and after the first 3 days he had done an excellent job. Almost all of it is gone, but after the first 3 days he died. Being distraught I took a water sample to the fish store for them to test it. They said other then my pH being a little low (7.9) and my Alkalinity a bit low (8 degrees KH) my other peramaters are perfect. They informed me that the low pH and alkalinity are not low enough to kill anything and they reassured me that I have no metals in my tank because my fish and corals would be dead as well. So the seahare died of A) poor acclimation, B) old age, C) choking to death from all the fabulous food I provided him. Either way his death looked bad, when I found him his intestine were hanging out of his mouth.

Another major issue with trying to beat the hair algae is not being able to keep my big snails alive. The snails dieing and the seahare dieing are completely unrelated, and the theory now is there is some type of predator in my tank like a pyramid snail. These little guys are the size of a grain of rice and prey on, among other things, turbo snails and clams. So, I decided to get a sixline wrasse to try and reduce the population. Anyway that is about it for now, below are some pictures I just took. I'll get an image of my new sixline wrasse up, he's being shy right now and enjoying the intricate cave system i have setup in my rock formation.


During my reef association's last auction I bought this Green Bubble Tip Anemone.



Here's a close up of my Acan coral, it's called an orange crush by many because the scientific name is hard to spell. If i could find a brown one of these i can fuse these two together and call it my Cleveland Browns coral.