Ph help pls

[pledosophy]

If you don't have the need for a calcium reactor, and aren't dosing large amounts of two part the increase in growth from a higher pH isn't going to benefit you.

Locking in at 8.3 24/7 is great if you are running a coral farm, but it is not practical nor is it necessary for the average reef keeper.

A lit refugium filled with macro algae might be a benefit to your tank. If you already have a refugium with rock now it would not be expensive to just get a cheap clip on light from Home Depot and put a bulb that will grow algae. Upgrade will probably cost you less than $20. Maybe another $10-15 for the algae. It's algae, it doesn't need anything fancy. (Another example where you could spend a few hundred more to get a 10% increase in growth rate). That macro algae addition would benefit your tank in many ways, and also slightly stabilize the pH during dark period on your display. Mostly it will help with nutrient export and pods, which is a better addition than the pH stabilization IME.

I went down the whole stable pH journey for a year on my display. Hooked up a probe, automated dosing pumps, kalkwasser solutions dosed based on pH. Tank sat between 8.29 and 8.35 for an entire year. Not a significant difference. I got tired of the kalk and just went back to two part. It's just not worth the trouble.

 

[dansyr]

Also FWIW your pH is shifting by about as much as naturally occurs in nature, maybe a bit less. Actual ocean pH shifts can be pretty varied as temperature and mixing play a role, but for context, we were logging seawater pH from around newport beach and the diurnal shift was about 0.3-0.5. Flat pH can work for sure (drexel's point, we're working in unnatural boxes) but that's not something that any coral ever experiences.

Philosophical tangent, I think some people may have started trying to decrease swings because of our modern lifestyle where we're gone from house during day so the natural pH increase isn't depressed by additional CO2, then whole family gets back at evening and all that extra CO2 production depresses the natural low more. If this kind of amplification makes the swings drastic, it might be useful to ameliorate, but I think that's more household-specific rather than goals for every reef tank.