Nice, that came down fast!

Hopefully your SPS won't be ****ed with you :wink:
Alk up really fast then down ...

Good luck dude !

I use muriatic in my new salt water.. 1ml will drop dkh buy 1 per 10gallons..you must let it circulate for a day after as ph drops fast.
I have used it on display buy mixing 1ml into 1liter of ro water and slowly dosing into tank via iv bag.

Thanks Greg. That's what I'm hoping....

Good to know. I haven't tried to use it in the display.

I've used it quite a bit in the past when I used IO. I've started using it again in H2Ocean since it seems over the years H2Ocean has higher and higher alkalinity. Locally there are no low-alkalinity salt mixes available, so muriatic acid it is. :) My dosing confirms the same as yours. pH does dip, but it only takes a couple hours to come back up ime.

Wow, thanks guys! This is why I love this forum...

Muriatic acid will definitely drop alkalinity but needs to be dripped slowly because it drops PH drastically.

Its essentially the same idea as kalkwasser. Its so high in PH that it needs to be dripped to raise alkalinity.

Usually at the rate of evaporation. It's not a bad idea to temporarily add it to your ATO.

Bumping an old thread here, but it seems to be the place to discuss...

My alkalinity measures 22 dKH, confirmed on two different branded tests, on a freshly mixed pail of Instant Ocean from RO water at 24 C.

I bought some snails from a marine pet store and but their water to the same tests, which came out to 28 dKH.

Both of my aquariums seem to run at ~20-22 by these tests and all inhabitants seem to be happy.


What is going on here? Is it as simple as dividing by 2 :) ?

What brand of test kits are you using and how old are they? Sounds like they belong in the garbage

An API and a Hagen. Both are new.


The API test strip shows ~180 ppm "ISH". So ~10 dKH.