salt recommendations

[Imbarrie]

No salts are perfect and some salts are better than others. Reef crystals is a great low price mix. Tropic Marin maybe better but with your tank and your cost concerns it probably isn't worth it.
You can change 20 gallons of new salt you will be fine. And I dose manually and I usually miss the schedule. Lol

 

[basiab]

I use Seachem Reef, costs a little more than IO and I feel it is much better. Your calcium usage depends on what is in your tank. And the size of the tank determines how much you should replace weekly. Replacing 10 gallon weekly for a 70 should be fine. Should probably be able to do just 7 gallons. So why is calcium low. How much were you replacing on the 40 weekly. Maybe you just have a bad batch of salt. I changed to Seachem from IO a while back when I heard that IO was having problems with consistancy. They probably resolved it by now but you may have ended up with a bad one.

 

[Jarrett]

i was only changing 5 gallons on the 45, and i guess its a possiblity. i went out today and bought the instant ocean reef crystals, so i am going to change 10 gallons when i get home and hope for the best.

 

[Wolf DOT]

Hey Jarrett,
so were you unhappy with the reef crystals?
i noticed you were getting rid of the rest of your supply

 

[Jarrett]

i dont know if i would say i am unhappy with it. it didnt really do anything for my levels i had to dose everything to fix my levels. so the salt didnt really fix anything. also i tested my make up water and the calcium and alk is right on point with the reef crystals but hte mag is really low. and i did have low mag for a long time untill i realized it and now i am dosing to get it back up. and i do still have half a bucket of instant ocean left if your interested pm me.

 

[Trainwreck]

i dont know if i would say i am unhappy with it. it didnt really do anything for my levels i had to dose everything to fix my levels. so the salt didnt really fix anything. also i tested my make up water and the calcium and alk is right on point with the reef crystals but hte mag is really low. and i did have low mag for a long time untill i realized it and now i am dosing to get it back up. and i do still have half a bucket of instant ocean left if your interested pm me.

Told ya to check the mag lol seriously tho, don't even check calcium without checking magnesium. Not gonna get into the details here, but it is crucial to have Mg of 1290-1480 depending on levels of SG,dKH,and Ca. For your tank, just shoot for Mg 1350 with Ca 430 dKH 8, SG depends on salt mix. sooo what salt are you using now? I just recently tried out Red sea coral pro...not a fan. Back to ESV again. I am DONE with trying out other salts.

 

[Trainwreck]

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-06/rhf/index.php

Check this out if your interested in the chemistry behind it, if not just shoot for the levels I recommended in the last post...those were levels that would be great for your tank with all softies (it is all softies, right?)

 

[CHEMCHEF]

I found my mag. got very high with ESV. I dose nothing and was way over 2000 mag.

 

[mtk]

Hey just read this and figured I would add my 0.02 because I had a similar problem about 9 month's ago. When I was mixing my water change water I knew exactly how much salt I needed per 10 gal of water. I would just dump it all in at once and noticed the water was a little cloudy and had white residue on the walls of the bucket. When I tested my water my lvls were all over the place but always way low. I found out if you dump salt into water too fast the water will not except all the elements and precipitate out and leave the water cloudy and a white residue on the bucket. I now mix my salt slowly. Dump small portions of salt over a two day period or if I am in a rush add some salt wait a little bit till water is clear and add more. I might have missed it but I thought you said you only had soft coral's. I don't know anything about softies but did not think they would pull ca or alk out of the water since they don't have a hard structure and if that is also the case there should be no need to dose anything if you do water changes. Your WC should bring it up. Oh since you asked I use reefers best salt.

 

[Jarrett]

its a mixed reef now i have montis sps and lps. what can i say i am hooked on the sps now. i use the coral pro reef salt. and it does cloud my water sometimes. i think its the calcium precipitating in the water but i check the calcium and its still 450 so shouldn't be a problem.

 

[mtk]

Cool. Well hope everything works out for you. It could have been a bad batch of salt you got or possibly just the way the salt was being mixed. Be careful not to raise your lvls too fast to quick as that could screw up your sps's. Oh yea also when I was talking about the water getting cloudy I was not talking about in your display tank but in the new water you are mixing in your WC bucket.

 

[Jarrett]

yea i dumped the salt all at once so maybe thats why my new water is cloudy. i dont want to waste the used salt though so i hope 10 gallons of cloudy water doesent do anything harmful to the aquarium. it looks like theirs so many elements in the coral pro salt its hard for it to accept it all. theirs even a white film on the top of the mixing bucket and i have a powerhead in their.

 

[Jarrett]

it looks like calcium perticipated but i checked the calcium level in it last night and it was good at 450