Wanting to know if dosing is a common practice. My main water paremeters are good except(according to the lfs) my calcium and Alk. My calcium is around 280 and the Alk is about 3.5 meq/L. They told me these were way low. I think my alk is fine. Calcium i agree is low. I have a bc14 that has been running over a month now. I have a false pecula some gsp a cuc,chaeto,chemi pure elite. Changing about 2 gallons of water a week. I am using the red sea brand salt(not coral pro). What are yalls thoughts?

i usually dose my tank. withe bionic two part solution and my calcium and alk is 480 and 10. and freaquently check it so i dont go over 500 and not below 400. and my alk usally stay 10-11

Dosing is common for those who need to be dosing. So, don't dose what you're not testing for and what is not being replenished adequately by water changes. Calcium is low; alkalinity is in the normal range (likely the LFS didn't realize the units of meq/L). However, you should first look to your livestock to decide if dosing is going to be useful. It appears to me you have no organisms that will appreciably use calcium. So, dosing calcium/alkalinity isn't useful for your situation.

Can I put you on my spped dial? Thanks for the informative post.!

Just for my growing understanding, if there are no animals that need calcium, what is depleting it in the water?

1) Just because you don't see any animals using it doesn't mean there aren't any.

2) Coralline algae.

In the back of my mind I thought about coralline algae, but I didn't want to mention that yet. Use your test kits to see if the calcium level between two water changes is staying the same or lowering. It's also a good idea to test the new saltwater itself to see if you're starting out with low calcium.

Don't dose anything unless you test for it. If the tank is young, you can expect some shifts in water chemistry.

I dose because my tank is now about 2.5 years old. I also have a continuous water change that swaps out 4 gallons per day which helps my water params. The only param I need to dose now is ALK. Bubble Magus dosing pump that doses 15mL of Bionic Part #1 daily in small quantities. Keeps the pH from swinging too much from dosing in batches.

I dose calcium and magnesium on a regular basis. My tank used both even before there was appreciable coralline algae or any stony corals, and still continues to use a lot of calcium (I have lots of coralline algae, snails, some stony corals, lots of things that would use calcium). My alk used to be pretty much taken care of by water changes (IO mixes up pretty high) but now I'm doing bimonthly water changes and so have started using bicarbonate (baking soda) between.

My original rock came from a big box pet store, so I suspect that there was some phosphate leaching from the live rock which would explain my calcium usage... I understand phosphate will bind calcium and precipitate it out of solution. It would also explain the ridiculous algae growth I had originally