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Old 11-14-2012, 08:08 AM
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asylumdown asylumdown is offline
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I'm pretty sure this was the salt I used to initially start up my tank. Scratch that, not pretty sure, 100% sure. I still have one of the empty buckets right here that I store filter socks in until it's time to wash them (love that easy to open lid!). The bucket says it can make 225 gallons of 1.026 water, but if I remember correctly, it took over 2 full buckets to get my water up to level. I also remember that my tank looked like milk for a week. Some of that was due to the sand of course, but since I added sand and rock first, and then took 3 days filling it with R/O water, it wasn't nearly that cloudy until the salt went in.

Looking back at my earliest tests right after the tank was filled in April, before i had any corals in it or was dosing anything, my dKH was 10.5, and my calcium was 520 (never tested magnesium).

My first couple of water changes were with salinity as well, and it irritated me to no end to find the water still cloudy after 8 hours of mixing with a powerhead. The water in my tank would be cloudy for almost a full day after the water change too.

My general rule is that I don't like to use anything that doesn't turn mostly clear within 20 minutes to half an hour of mixing, so I switched back to using D-D H2Ocean after the salinity was used up. It's on the pricey side, and made even pricier as I seem to need more cups of it to get the right salinity than something like instant ocean, but it's 90% clear within 15 minutes of mixing, and it's levels are all exactly what I try to dose to anyway. When I was trying to replicate reefbuilders 'Ecoreef One' tank while my house was still under construction, I used H2Ocean for 100% weekly water changes on a 5 gallon tank, and the corals never seemed irritated or stressed.
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