tankedchemist
Reef enthusiast
So, I ran out of my favorite old salt-- which was running low on alk pretty consistently anyway-- and I'm on an epic journey to find *the* perfectly balanced salt mix. I'm mostly looking at the balance of mag/ca/alk. Today, I made up some instant ocean reef crystals because my mom had a bucket of it sitting around. Here are the results of my tests:
Salinity: 1.026
Alk: 13 dKH
Ca: 580 ppm
Mg: 1250-1300
so, as you can tell, alk and ca (especially ca) are pretty darn high, while Mg is on the low side of the scale. My options are either to not use this salt at all, to add epsom salt to increase Mg as well as/or decrease the salinity to 1.025 and see if that decrease Alk/Ca to a more acceptable range
also, is it bad to have Ca so high? I've never seen it above 520 or so...
Salinity: 1.026
Alk: 13 dKH
Ca: 580 ppm
Mg: 1250-1300
so, as you can tell, alk and ca (especially ca) are pretty darn high, while Mg is on the low side of the scale. My options are either to not use this salt at all, to add epsom salt to increase Mg as well as/or decrease the salinity to 1.025 and see if that decrease Alk/Ca to a more acceptable range
also, is it bad to have Ca so high? I've never seen it above 520 or so...