I’ve been in this hobby for 25 years (on and off) at this point. I’ve been through trickle filters, sediment filters, metal halides, bioballs, floating hydrometers… you name it! If it was once a fad in the hobby, I probably tried it. One thing has always remained constant. I’m a firm believer that using band-aid style fixes to address issues in the tank is only for the lazy. Algae-fix in a bottle? No way! Get your nutrients under control! Low pH? Don’t put a buffer in, get more air turn over in the house! Anything you dose from a bottle, is it really solving a problem or masking one?
So, how am I breaking this rule? I’m adding a two-part dosing system to my tank… Maybe I’m not really breaking my rule, maybe I’m just adjusting my thinking on it. 
In any event, I’ve always been against dosing most things in a tank. Amino-acids, coral growth drops, etc all just seem like snake oil and I’ve never seen a world-class tank that uses any of them. My tank is pretty stable and is growing fairly well. I’ve been having a harder and harder time keeping my alk and calc in line with just water changes though. I started supplementing with TLF two-part and found the results were not so good. I’d miss a day (or a week) and the levels would drop severely. I got sick of it and decided it was time to do something about it…
I ordered the BRS two-part complete setup with dosers yesterday. I also bought an expansion module for my Reef Angel so I can control everything. I’m hoping I can dial in my dosing and improve my tank’s performance.
Who else runs a dosing setup? Let’s see some pics! I’ll post mine once I get it in there (probably next week).
I will be following this. I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of my new apex unit I ordered yesterday.
I do agree with your stance on “snake oil” but dosing is not in the same category. You can do water changes so much that you have to buy salt which is more expensive long term every month or more frequent. I have a fairly small tank and have always battled a lower kh then what I wanted it has been more in the 6-7 range. I do my weekly water changes religiously since the tank has been up. If I dose sea chem 2 part daily just for a few days it shows but manually dosing just isn’t feasible every day to keep fluctuations down to minimum.
I have been looking at multiple dosers including the brs, apex, bubble magus and a couple others and cost, programmability, accuracy comes into play. So I would love to see how these work out for you.
Please document whatever you can from calibration to use and even programming think this really could be helpful to a lot of people looking to go this route.
Got all of the equipment in hand, now I just need to put everything together. The dosing pumps are a LOT thicker than I expected. Not a problem, just surprising.
I’m in the process of implementing some custom code on my Reef Angel so it will not only run the dosing pumps (that’s a built in function) but will allow me to adjust the dosing volumes from my phone and save them to internal memory in the event of a power outage. Nice thing about an open source controller is that you can do whatever you want
Once I’ve got the code working, I’m going to move on to mounting everything. I bought the slimeline jugs from BRS so they can fit in my stand in front of the sump. They’re a little wider than advertised, so I can’t stack them like I planned, but they fit next to each other. I need to wire up a second relay box (already had it) and get that mounted along with the two dosers too. I’m thinking of moving a bunch of stuff around in the sump to make life a little easier in the future.
I have been using the BRS two-part and dosers for 2 years. They help me keep ALK (night) and CAL (day) levels where they should be. I hooked them up to my Apex and slowly increased the drip time over 3 week period with testing. I would not say its a quick fix. You are adding in elements that are being used faster than a normal water change could keep up with. You could do bigger or more frequent changes but again that is also a type of “FIX”. I get your point.
Bill