Low PH issues

[gnatp2]

R u dosing continuously? If your using limewater continuously and having your fuge lit 24/7 then you should see less pH swings. And when you aerated the water you still got a ph of 7.88, not 8. To be using limewater and a lit fuge and still have such a high CO2 (pH and alk readings far off from each other) and such a large swing because of the CO2 puzzles me. I would still recheck the measuring equipment just in case.

What salt you using?

David - What buffers were you reading about? I just switched to red sea.

Yes, I was dosing continuously.

So I recalibrated my PH probes and there was no change at all. (well .05, but basically nothing). I then rethought my testing using the lamotte alk test. It is kinda tough to tell exactly when it switches from blue to purple. There's a bit of "grey" area.... So when I redid the test and used the lowest level of purple I saw, I came up with 110 ppm or about 6.0 dKH. These seems like the most logical conclusion to me given that my PH is so low and swinging quite a bit. I'm going to slowly add some baked baking soda liquid to the tank and get the alk up to around 9.0. Hopefully this will keep the PH more in line.

So far I've raised it to 7.0 and the PH has gone from 8.0 (at its highest when the lights have been on the longest) to 8.1.

Thanks for the help guys,
Nate

 

[gnatp2]

Here's an update.

Well, my ph has been staying between 8.2 at night and 8.3 during the day for the past 3 days now. Here's what I've done to get it there:
1) added a lot of alk using baked baking soda (as in randy's 2-part recipe) to get the alk from possibly as low as 7.0 to 9.5. (while doing the lomotte test I'm now stopping my titration as soon as I can possibly consider it being purple when I was added a few more drops before)
2) Added another fan to increase evaporation of water to therefore increase the dosing of kalk
3) Increased the amt of kalk in my kalk stirrer from 3/4" to 1.5"
4) Added an airstone with an air pump. The air pump I ended up getting was A LOT bigger than I expected. Probably should have researched that a bit more before my order.
5) Turned off the CO2 for the calcium reactor completely.


To truly identify the source(s) of my problem, I probably should have just done these steps one at a time, but I was eager to just get my PH up and sort out the source of my problem later. Now, I'm going to slowly go back on these 5 steps and figure out if everything I am doing is really necessary.

Thanks to everyone for their help,
Nate