Seachem Reefsalt Review

[Canadian]

What's the consensus about this salt?

I've been using Kent salt in my SPS dominated tank but I'm finding when freshly mixed the parameters in my mixing container are: Ca up to around 500 and Alk down around 5-6dKH after I get the ridiculous amount of precipitate I've become accustomed to with freshly mixed Kent salt.

I'm hoping that Seachem Reefsalt will keep me around 450mg/L for Ca and 8-9dKH for Alk. And perhaps of equal importance, I'm hoping Seachem Reefsalt will mix cleanly without a bunch of precipitate.

What has everyone's experience with Seachem Reefsalt been?

[i have crabs]

havnt tested for a while but i think with reefsalt and oceanpure pro ive had good calcium and magnesium but low alk in both.

[niloc16]

i recently changed to it from IO and used a whole bucket. i have lost about 8 full size sps colonies and a handful of smaller colonies. and of course they were all the expensive ones that died first. so in my opinion it is no good

[bv_reefer]

very happy with sc reef salt, i switched over from kent a few months back. my calcium was alright, but as mentioned alkalinity was always low and had to be buffered constantly with kent. i believe my alk back then hovered around 6-8 dKH and calcium around 380. last time i checked with reef salt (with regular calcium+alk buffer of course) i'm stuck at 460 calcium and 8-9 alk. i've heard from alot of ppl that kent salt is starting to go down hill so i decided to give reef salt a try and am pretty happy so far, hope that helps :wink:

[christyf5]

The first time I tried it I wasn't impressed. Apparently it has quite a bit of borate in it which throws off your alkalinity readings (apparently it raises your test kit reading by 1dkH) and I dunno, but it didn't do the greatest thing for my tank, not to the extent of Colins tank though but my corals weren't happy and neither was I. In an emergency a couple of months ago I had to pick up a bucket of it as nothing else was available. It was fine for the waterchange I needed to do but after that IO became available and I ended up mixing the two together to offset each other and am now down to just the IO. I would certainly never use it on its own again and hopefully will be trying some Tropic Marin Pro soon.

[Ephraim]

I seem to remember seeing a thread on RC about the borate problem, and that was susposed to be resolved.

I used the salt, and I am happy with it. Dont have to supplement the water before adding to the tank which is nice.

[om6acw]

I hope this can help you little bit.

http://www.aquariumwatertesting.com/AWT_Salt_Analysis_0208.pdf

[LeeR]

i really dont like it, it leaves my water cloud and there are large particals left after 24 hours..

[kwirky]

I've mixed at least 15-20 buckets of the stuff at the store. I use it if we run out of reefer's best. It takes FOREVER to mix and sometimes doesn't fully mix if the salt was added while the water was cold. Sometimes the cloudiness doesn't go away even 12+ hours later. The alkalinity and calcium is pretty good though, usually testing in the recommended ranges.

We have lost livestock here and there, nothing major, because of the slow mixing speed of this salt. When you've got 200-300 gallons of water to change in a single day and only a 50 gallon mixing basin this is not the best salt to use. That's why we prefer reefer's best over the seachem even though it's like double the cost (and cost is important when you've got profit margins to maintain). Overall the gripe for this salt is it doesn't mix fast like oceanpure pro or reefer's best.

If it's given a full 24 hours though it's not bad. The price is great for how it tests and I think reefers who have the time to wait for the stuff to mix can find it a good quality salt for the price. We trust our corals with this salt over oceanpure pro.

[Snappy]

I tried it about 2 years ago and won't use it again.

[whatcaneyedo]

I just went through my first 2 buckets of SeaChem out of curiosity. At a salinity of 1.025 I measured the Calcium to be 600ppm, Alk 10dkh, and Mg 1275. I used both Salifert test kits and Elos test kits and sort of averaged these amounts.

The Salt does take a long time to mix but I always like to have a 20 gal garbage can of ready to use saltwater so I always have a full week to let the new saltwater mix before I even use it.

While I've been using it I havent had to adjust the Calcium in my tank because the salt mix always shoots it right back up each time I do a water change. I've also experienced my sebae anemone spawning 4 times in the few months that I have been using this salt... although I dont think it was the salt to blame. Also, nothing has died while using it.

[Nate]

Use it in about 40 plus maintenance tanks of mine, almost all are premixed from the last visit.

Works great, requires little testing as it has great consistency, but does take a while to mix.

Used a lot of salts, and I like seachem b/c of price, avail, and consistency.

[reeferious]

everytime calcium tested above 500 while alk around 5 to 6. what's wrong with this company anyway?

[TJSlayer]

Been using it from the start and have great results.

But it does take a while to mix and clear, but I normally do it a day in advance anyway...

[Canadian]

Wow. Lots of replies!

From the looks of things there's some pretty significant inconsistencies and several posts have confirmed the high Ca concern that seems to be getting blown off by Seachem.

I guess I'll go with Reef Crystals and add some Ca upon mixing.

[martym]

What about Tropic marine pro ? Any good