Will do, but I'm gonna safely assume its instant ocean cause it's probably the cheapest they have and they're not really all that great of a store in terms of caring anymore so I wouldn't be surprised[emoji23] I'll ask them tomorrow
By mixing it with the cheapest salt they carry...
I've had corals in the tank for two years, just that I've put the maximum in for what I want. I've kept mostly soft corals and lps corals but I've accumulated a few plating corals/montipora. Just that recently, since I have a few hard sps corals, I want to start supplementing them. The only serious issue I've seen with my tank is the alkalinity and ph, which I could bring up no problem. My calcium is at 390 after two weeks, which isn't a hugely low number for what's in the tank. My mg is actually in a safe range for it as well. Was just looking for something to keep those numbers more stable and maybe a small amount higher. Doesnt sound like a huge jump to me except for dkh? Thanks for the reply though :) and my lfs is not that great, I dont tend to just blindly buy things from them, I drive over an hour to a reef shop to get my corals so I know all I need to about them.
Yeah it is haha, I figured I'd be in good shape but I'm gonna test it today after I get a few gallons of it:)
First I'd say don't chase pH. Second you need to get your levels at which you want to run them with either water changes or manually/auto dosing to get them up then not dose for 2-3 days and test what your levels are and devide it by the amount of days not dosed to get your daily usage.
Thanks for the input!
Thank you!
No problem. Have you been using reef fusion long or just starting? Also why are you dosing purple up as this is mainly to start coraline algae which will use even more alkalinity did the store recommended this product?
Yes my lfs advised me to use purple up as another calcium additive so that I can eventually get my numbers up to the 450 range, which I think that reef fusion buffers at around 420ish? I could care less about coraline algae at the moment, but purple up is sort of giving me another little boost in calcium levels so that my numbers dont get buffered at too low of a calcium level. And I know it's not too low for a mixed reef but I have a few more plating corals/chalices so it would be better to be around 450 for it. Here is a picture of my tank
That is an awesome tank! Yeah this heads have been growing like crazy on my euphilia corals and I would likely put that as the main suspect of the nutrient suckers even with the plates in the tank. I started with the two hammers, the frogspawn and the candy cane all with 1 head as 5 dollar frags. Now the hammers have about 8 heads each and the frogspawn 4 and the candy cane, well its softball sized even when I broke about 8 heads off and moved them to the other side. I'm not really a huge fan of buffers because as someone has told me before they usually add unwanted stuff to the water especially when they actually "buffer". A week ago my dkh was 5.4! Now it's at 6 and all the levels in my tank are looking up! I'm just trying to dose so that I'm not raising the numbers way too fast, but quick enough so that I dont have a crash. By the way, are those montipora growing branches all over? Wanted to get a frag or two when I got my parameters in check.That's a fantastic looking tank I can see the corals you have there as soon as they get growing the alk will get sucked up with the plating Montis and for every euphyllia that splits into 2 then they split in to 2 it all gets used. See I never buffered mine just used water changes to keep levels right then I added a couple 1 inch frags that just encrusted for the first 3-4 months so didn't really test much then all of a sudden the encrusting bit shot up loads of stalks and the alk just dropped and dropped as still wasn't really testing it just water changes. Then I lost a coral to rtn and tested and alk was 5.4. So now I dose. Mistake learnt.
This was March last year.
This week.
Thanks.
Yeah that's quite the colony! I know a lot about big colonies taking up real estate :) I have a 20 gallon aio tank, doesnt give me much to work with. Probably will frag or sell colonies once they get big enough and start over with a new type of the same species! By the way, once I get my parameters back up, I'll be looking for some frags ;)Thanks.
I think you can run low just as long as they didn't drop low and have accustomed to it not shocked to it and it's stable I think I ran for 2 months at 6.4.
I just feel it's like being on a knife edge and too easy to go down to far and impact badly on the animals. Just stability and a bit of common sense help alot in this hobby.
I even tried running kalkwasser in my ato and with the hot weather we had here in th UK last month my evaporation went up which in turn brought my pH up to 8.5-8.6 so as i couldn't control the evaporation I went manual to keep alk up. My normal pH was only 7.8-8 max really. My hammers have grown from a 5 head to over 60 at the mo on the one on the right, with fragging over 40 heads off over the years ( it was the first coral I bought 13 years ago).I have put 20 in my sons tank and sold the rest, I have kept 10 separate for my new tank in my bedroom though.my tank is only 24x18x18. It is quite a large hammer colony.
I'm in the UK unfortunately. I do have frogspawn but I don't know why it's sulking at the mo though. It's all retracted and not happy.
