The aquarium hobby has always had a strong spirit of doing it yourself, for many it’s one of the big appeals of this aquarium world. Some aquarists like building everything from scratch but for the rest of us there’s Avast Marine.
Avast Marine has been offering a variety of ‘You Built’ DIY kits which allows aquarists to build otherwise expensive equipment in a very affordable and approachable package. I recently decided to dose kalkwasser to my personal reef system specifically to increase the pH (and subsequent coral growth) so I decided to take the Avast Marine DIY Kalk Stirrer kit for a spin.
I have a reasonable degree of DIY building experience but have never really cut and prepped acrylic tubing on my own, nor did I want to start with a crucial piece of equipment for my reef. But I certainly can follow ‘paint by numbers’ level of instruction which is about how easy Avast’s Kalk Stirrer kit was to build.
Whatever my expectation of the involvement and difficulty of assembling the kalk stirrer was, it was dead simple and super fast to assemble my own kit. Most of the time was spent waiting for certain steps to dry and cure and totally assembly time couldn’t have totaled more than 15 minutes.
I didn’t take pictures of the process because Avast’s own step-by-step video tutorial is clear as can be. I literally spent more time building a unique dedicated shelf on which to mount the kalk stirrer than I did on assembling the thing.
Starting at just $159 the Avast Marine Kalk Stirrer kit was a real pleasure to put together and since I did it myself, I know all the parts of this device inside and out, and am pleased to see a full 0.2 rise in pH of my main reef aquarium.
