A kid at the LFS was trying to sell me a calcium buffer/booster without knowing where my water tested at.
I told him 3 times, "I'm NOT dosing anything untill I get a test kit for that SPECIFIC chemical and find out where my tank water is."
He was a high school aged kid--maybe 20yrs old at the most. Kept telling me how he used this product and his tank and his corals blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
I ended up telling him that he was an idiot and left. He just would NOT listen to what I was telling him. I'm NOT going to dose my tank with any trace elements or buffers until I can test for it and show a deficiency.
I think that regular water changes probably does a lot for your trace elements. If you want to dose for calcium or whatever, get a test kit for that first and see where your at. Just willy nilly dumping addatives and chemicals in your tank sounds like a sure-fire way to screw up a good thing.
You could very well need calcium for your coraline. And you might need a pH buffer.
Test for it first.
If you can run a test consistantly on a daily or weekly basis and show a certain deficiency, then you could figure out how much you need to dose and how frequently.
Let's say you buy a calcium test kit and you test every day for a month. If the test shows that you are consistanly low (like 300 or 350) then you can decide if you want to dose the tank back up to a normal level. (450+/-). Once you have established that your tank nees to be dosed every 2 days with X amount of calcium--then maybe you can slack off to testing it once a week for peae of mind. But, run a lot of baseline tests up front to establish how fast your tank is depleting the calcium.
Same with any other things you may want to dose. Run baseline tests on a consistant basis and establish the pattern first. Dose the tank accordingly. Then you might think about slowing down on the testing once you have a regular and consistant routine down.
I'm a newbie though. Thats how I'd do it, but the rest of the group around here might have better advice.
(sry for rambling so long :shock: )
