Our Daily Dose

We're often asked what additives we regularly use in our coral farm. While all additives have their place, these are the additives that we're actually using every day to farm our corals. Some of them I could easily recommend to anyone, and others are more for solving particular problems that we run into when farming large volumes of corals.

The dosing of all of these products should be done in accordance with proper testing of your water chemistry to ensure that you are dosing the correct amount. The goal with dosing these products is to maintain the stability of the major and minor elements in your aquarium not to chase any particular numbers.

Reef Code A B

Calcium, Magnesium, Strontium	Alkalinity

Reef Code is a 2-part system that makes up the vast majority of what we're dosing to our tanks. It's highly concentrated and comes in bulk powder sizes for people who are dosing large amounts of this on a daily basis.

Reef Code A is a balanced Calcium, Magnesium, and Strontium supplement. Reef Code A handles the dosing of all of our Major Elements in the coral farm.

All of the elements in this product are in the correct ratio that corals consume while building their skeleton. This means that you only need to test for calcium, while dosing Reef Code A and doing so will also dose the correct amounts for your other elements such as magnesium and strontium assuming your tank doesn't have any unusual chemical imbalances.

Reef Code B is the pH buffer that we use to maintain stable Alkalinity. This one is pretty straightforward, through regular testing of your alkalinity you can figure out how much Reef Code B you need to dose to maintain stable alkalinity.

As your corals grow and you add more corals to your tank, your dosing needs for both Reef Code A and B will increase in proportion to the amount of skeletal coral growth happening.

As this is a 2-part system, when your tank's water chemistry is properly balanced you'll need to dose the exact same amount of both of these products. However, you should still be testing both Alkalinity and Calcium when figuring out how much you need to dose as it's not uncommon for tanks to be slightly out of balance and therefore require a different amount of dosing for each.

Replenish

Trace Elements

Replenish is what we use to maintain our levels of trace elements in the farm. We do get trace elements from doing water changes with NeoMarine salt, and for most aquarists, consistent water changes of a high quality salt should be enough to maintain trace elements. However, if you have a tank full of stoney corals, water changes alone likely won't be enough, your corals will consume the trace elements faster than your water changes can replenish. This is when you want to start dosing trace elements.

Direct dosing of trace elements is something that should be done with ICP testing as you're likely to over or under dose if you don't know what your levels are.

Lugol's

Iodine

Similar to Replenish, Lugol's is only needed in tanks where there is enough coral growth that water changes alone aren't enough to maintain Iodine levels in your aquarium.

Lugol's is the Iodine Supplement that we use in our farm to ensure we can maintain our iodine levels. Iodine is essential for the health of your corals and maintaining proper levels in your aquarium can help keep your corals coloured up.

NeoNitro and NeoPhos

Nitrate	Phosphate

NeoNitro and NeoPhos are good supplements for tanks that run into issues with low nutrients. While Brightwell makes some amazing additives for tanks struggling with high nutrients such as Reef Biofuel and Phosphate-E, we almost never use these in our farm as our tanks seem to always be suffering from the opposite problem. The way our tanks are set up with heavy filtration and wall to wall corals it can be difficult to maintain nutrients in the water as all of the corals are constantly sucking them up. Particularly for us, our nitrates tend to be the problem. However, we do occasionally run into low phosphates as well.

Because of this, we have NeoNitro on a dosing pump for all systems to ensure our Nitrates don't hit zero. We manually dose NeoPhos when needed to ensure Phosphates don't hit zero.

It's important that you don't dose these products without proper testing of your water before hand. Nutrients can be tricky to maintain at the proper levels in a reef tank and dosing the wrong product can actually make your problems worse.

Kalk + 2

pH

Kalk dosing is the most advanced form of dosing we do in our farm and it's not something we recommend doing unless you have a good understanding of how water chemistry works in a reef tank. While kalk dosing can also be viewed as a basic beginner friendly form of dosing for you alkalinity and calcium, we only dose kalk to keep our pH at the desired levels. 

We set our kalk to dose only when our pH is below 8.3, while it's below 8.3 we are consistently dosing it until our pH is back above 8.3. Often this means that our Kalk is dosing consistently throughout the night and almost never during the day.

When doing this, it's important to understand that this will also affect your major elements and it needs to be accounted for when calculating how much 2-part you'll be dosing as you'll need less 2-part when dosing kalk to maintain pH. This is really only something you can do if you have enough calcium and alkalinity consumption in the tank that you'll still need to dose a 2-part solution on top of the kalk otherwise the kalk dosing to maintain your pH will cause your alkalinity and calcium to continue rising higher than you'd like.