Any one using this new kalk reactor made by Two Little Fishes or know of some else using it. I have read a few reviews about it and all have been positive. Can’t beat the price if you are already using an ATO with a holding tank.
Have one and my basement and several at use at several clients. Will be buying myself another soon hopefully. In my opinion it works great and you can’t beat the price. I only run mine at night time using level sensors and my Apex controller. If the pH is really high in the tank I have it programmed to dose fresh water. If there is a leak in my system and my sump appears to be low in after 3 minutes of adding fresh water then my Apex will stop topping off and shoot me an e-mail. If my ATO can’t keep up then a skimmer has suddenly gotten super full or there is water on the floor somewhere and I would rather that not be quickly replaced with top off water.
[quote=“houndsbayman, post:1, topic:2819”]
Any one using this new kalk reactor made by Two Little Fishes or know of some else using it. I have read a few reviews about it and all have been positive. Can’t beat the price if you are already using an ATO with a holding tank.[/quote]
John, where are you looking to buy it from? I haven’t seen it for sell yet. I saw a post about it from Little Fishies.
thanks for the reply Jon, sounds like it is a good investment to me.
So far the best price I have seen is at Fins Depot for $60.99 and marine Depot has it for $64.99, have to see which one has the better deal including shipping.
Probally will order one later today.
Hey John, carefully with Fins depot. Ordered some stuff from them in the past and after I placed the order they told me they were out of stock and it was a pain to get them to issue an refund vs store credit and then took over a month I believe to get my refund. Marine Depot is a lot better vendor to deal with.
Yeah, that happened to me with Salty Supply INc when Iordered new VHO bulbs. Never again. I really like doing business with Marine Depot, they have very good customer service.
Just got done ordering the kalk reactor from Marine Depot. They are great to deal with. They have a price guarentee box that you can place in a competitors price, total price with tax, shipping and handling. So marine Depot’s price with shipping was $73.99 and Fins Depot was $71.98, so I placed the info in the price guarentee box at Marine Depot and it adjusted the total price instantly to the cheaper price. WOW!!!
PBJ! :BEER
Tax, lol. Out of staters. 
I send this to John via PM, wouldn’t hurt to post it here for others to see. I use a controller with multiple pH probes and many floats and water sensors to keep an eye on things and alert me to issues:
Quick very broad overview:
Kalkwasser has high pH. Only problem is if it is only add calcium and keeping your Alk high your Mg and Strontium will start to fall. I use Brightwell’s Kalk +2 which additional adds Mg and Sr in a balanced ratio. The limitation is that you can only add as much as you need to top off. Some people with kalk reactors will employ the use of more fans to help with gas exchange and evaporation so they can dose more kalk.
Calcium reactor has low pH and can add CO2 gas to the tank to the tank, those two are definitely two negatives. Benefits of the calcium reactor is there isn’t the limitation of only adding it when fresh water needs to be added. The other big plus is a calcium reactor will add Ca, Carbonates, Mg, Sr, and many other minor and trace elements in the same ratio in which they were used to make coral skeletons. Some media will release phosphates into the tank and some media has been known to be low in Mg.
I use kalk+2 as much as I can, but only when the lights are out to help even out the pH night to day. Then I tune the Calcium reactor to fill in where it can’t keep up.(which in my case is a lot) I also now recommend calcium reactors which have multiple stages to exhaust the CO2 on the effluent and help restore the pH. Vertex makes a very nice one.
Be very careful with Kalk as it can burn your skin. Also limit how much you put in the KW300 especially at first.
Good info John, thanks.
The other John. Great buy! might have to do the same. Thanks
Houndsbay John, are you replacing your calcium reactor, or just supplementing it with the kw? I’m curious why either way…
share the wisdom…
I am going to use the kalk reactor to supplement my calcium reactor. Recently, I bought a ph monitor from Milwaukee to control the effluent coming out of the calcium reactor. What this does is to keep the effluent drip at a proper ph at all times and will control the CO2 amount going into the reactor, which will make the calcium reactor work at peak performance. Unfortunately, with the reactor working this way, the ph in the tank is too low for my liking and not stable.
The kalk reactor will be hooked up to my ATO, so that when the system calls for top off water, it will go thru the kalk reactor and the top off water will stabilize my ph readings. And the lime water will add some calcium and alkalinity to the system as well, which should be fine because of the high demand for calcium in my tank. I will be monitoring my parameters very closely once I get it on the system.
Hope this helps to understand what is the purpose for this item.
John, the often used trick to keep a calcium reactor effluent up in PH is to run the discharge line through a second chamber of media. that insures that all the CO2 and carbonic acid has been consumed by reacting with media, and not dumping a slightly lower PH mix to the tank. Have you looked into something like that? a second buffer reactor chamber.
I have read about doing a second chamber, that this will successfully raise the PH in the effluent, but it cannot raise it all the way to the tank’s pH, so the low pH problem does not completely disappear.
Here is a paragraph from an article by Randy Holmes-Farley about low PH.
“A final approach, and probably the most successful, is to combine the CaCO3/CO2 reactor with another alkalinity supplementation scheme that raises pH. The most useful method in this application is limewater. In this situation, the limewater is not being used to provide large amounts of calcium or alkalinity, but to soak up some of the excess CO2, and thereby raise the pH. The amount of limewater needed is not as large as for full maintenance of calcium and alkalinity. The limewater addition can also be put on a timer to add it only at night and early morning when the daily pH lows are most likely to be problematic. The limewater addition could also be on a pH controller, so that it is added only when the pH gets unusually low (such as below pH 7.8 or so).”
I knew i read something about that somewhere.
I Can’t argue with Randy!
You could translate Randy’s words into programming for a controller. Here is my Kalkwasser dosing instructions with comments after the //
Fallback OFF
//If for some reason the surge strip which controls the outlet loses communication with the brain of my controller it will turn off.
OSC 000:30/000:10/000:00 Then ON
// I don’t want it to do too much at once and perciptate, so I allow it to add for 10 seconds and then force it to wait 30 seconds before adding more.
Min Time 000:10 Then ON
//If it only turns on for a second it likely won’t do anything, so I tell it once it turns on stay on for 10seconds.
If Time 15:55 to 21:50 Then OFF
//This is right before my lights turn off and a little after they turn on.
If pH > 08.27 Then OFF
//If the pH in my tank happens to already be high I won’t let it add even more high pH solution.
If Outlet SumpLow = OFF Then OFF
//If it doesn’t need any top off fresh water then it will be off.
If Outlet TopSumpFloat = OFF Then OFF
//If water reaches to top sump float then I really don’t need water.
If Outlet ATOResGood = OFF Then OFF
//If my ATO Reservoir doesn’t have water I don’t want to burn up a pump sucking air.
If Outlet ATO_TooLong = ON Then OFF
//If for some reason the rate it normally adds water isn’t filling the sump then there must be a leak or the ATO pump has failed.
If Outlet XWRONGX = ON Then OFF
//If my chemistry is really out of whack like super high or low temps, I don’t want equipment like this running until I see what is going on.
If FeedA 002 Then OFF
If FeedB 002 Then OFF
If FeedC 000 Then OFF
//Last three I use because when I feed the tank I often will take water out to soak the food in, so I don’t want it to replace that water with fresh and if I am doing maintenance on the tank I don’t want it to top off.