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Thank you Eric. Hey RyanNI, maybe use it to salt your walk way.
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Hey Puddles, it's a little late in the year for salting the walkway, or at least I hope it is  . Eric, I'm sorry to ask you this but I am having a really hard time trying to decide what salt to switch to. I know I am switching for sure, just having a hard time with a brand. My tank is mainly SPS, so calcium, alk, and magnesium would be most important. Here are the options I would like to stick with because of the seller.......cheap shipping. Oceanic, Seachem, Red Sea coral pro, Tropic Marin, Kent, Coralife, Red sea, and hW Marinemix plus bioelements. I know there are a lot of different tests out there but I've also heard that most are not accurate, I believe you did a test which I may not have seen? I just don't want to throw $50 out the window for something "bad" again. Thanks for any advice or opinions on these brands of salt.
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I'm not endorsing or recommending any at this point, and some I have not tested or tried. People have run successful reef tanks on all those salts, but based on what I have seen and given the apparent problem you are having with RC, I would personally use Red Sea (don't know about the pro version - have not tested, measured, or used).
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| Thanks Eric! It does seem as though every salt has it's flaw, and after reading nearly all day yesterday I just confused myself even more. According to what I've read there is definitely no perfect salt. I did see you were "kind of" saying some good things about Red Sea in your M.A.R.S.H project. Your package will be going out shortly. Thanks again for your opinion on the salt at least, it surely helps.
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I spoke with a LFS manager recently and he said that many salts are manufactured by the same manufacturer in China now, maybe at even the same facility? The list included:
Instant Ocean, Reef Crystals, Kent, Oceanic and Corallife salts. Anyway, in the last few months he has had several of his customers complaining about formulation being off (low Alk, High Ca, strange color of newly mixed salt).
Now I have not worked to independently verify his information, but I do vaguely remember hearing something about Kent being purchased by the same manufacturer as IO and RC and that production would be at one facility.
Brian
7 years FW, 5 years SW
Education is the solution to pollution, not dilution.
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It's really the only way they can keep cost down for the consumers,but they really should up QC. I've been hearing that Seachem has been having a few issues with super high Ca. Over 500 ppm. If I go with a salt that has low Ca and Alk, I don't mind doing supplementation. I have the stuff to help raise the Ca and Alk for future use. The one question I have is, if it is the water I use for my makeup SW, wouldn't I be experiencing similar issues in my FW tanks too? It's only happening in my SW tanks.  I don't know. We'll see.
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| I thought I'd give everyone an update. I have talked with "Puddles" and she has not seen a decrease or increase in algae even after switching salts, although I'm not sure how much she actually used. I have not switched (bucket of Red sea on the way) but did do a large water change a week or so ago. The thing that really bothers me is this, "Puddles" did a test in her home, she used two 10 gallon tanks, one with the Reef Crystals, one with the Seachem, the Seachem grew no algae, the Reef Crystals did, my experience is the same, my mixing bin is full of brown algae and will need to be sterilized AGAIN before making any saltwater. The montipora tuberculosa seems to have recovered after the iodine swab, the acropora was not so lucky. My tank seems to be consistantly the same, WC or none, the brown algae persists but does not seem to get any worse. I have not done many water changes and it seems the less I do the better off I am? My skimmer is full after a day or two (Euroreef RS-135) and yet my PO4 is 0 on test kits and my nitrates are 0 or extemely close. All of my corals have gone "pastel" because of the nutrient free environment. I have Xenia, it does not spread at all, over a year and a few months, it has done very little, it's living but not thriving. My chaeto is growing very fast lately as well as the halimeda, nutrient related? I am so confused about this it makes my head spin but we'll see after I get the new salt. Eric thank you for all your help and testing, no reply to this is needed, just thought I'd give readers an update.
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Hey guys. The big tank the stuff is hanging in there like a hang nail. I did notice something tonite when I went to shut my actinics off. The algae has like these little bubbles on it  . Kind of like champagne bubbles not a lot of them. Really fine. Is the stuff creating a gas by chance? I don't notice any smell from the tank.
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| The bubbles are oxygen produced by photosynthesis. Chuck
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I got both your salts and looked at them under the scope and compared them to a 150 gallon container of RC I have here and have been using for well over a year without issue.
The salt crystals in both your samples are similar but a lot more heterogenous in size compared to mine. There is variation in size in mine, too, but both of yours have very different crystal sizes although are uniform in shape. The crystals were so hygroscopic they were moving and dissolving in the air as I looked at them, and the salt appears very dry in the bag. I reheated to drive off water and did not see recrystallization occurring in a way that would account for the variance so I assume these are just different salts mixed together (could be wrong, because as salts melt as they absorb water they can use other crystals as nuclei for crystallization, making the other crystal larger).
Puddles, your dark spots are also salt crystals, and without pulling the few that were in the sample, I would suspect they are iron-containing salts (source is\sues?). As you mention in your note, they are soluble,and I don't see that there is enough material there to cause an issue, but contaminants suggest again a sourcing issue. That's it for the update for now. Will check chemistry and effects on clones over the nextfew days.
Ryan - glad you noted that salts straight from the bag can grow algae. Amazing, huh?
As for Ca, I never tested SeaChem, but Oceanic was always way off the scale with calcium. Way way too high.
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