How would you correct for an unexpected drop in salinity? Like if your ATO tried to overfill your tank?
This is as total noob thing. I am kinda embarrassed to be honest. Totally self inflicted.
The long story:
My skimmer was in need of tuning (still learning). The cup was filling up a lot with mostly water. My ATO was compensating for the drop by adding fresh water. After a couple of days of this I decided I should test my salinity. Sure enough I dropped from my 1.025 to 1.024. Not a biggie because I only have fish right now and they kinda liked it. I am getting some coral this weekend I wanted I wanted to just bump that back up to my normal parameters of 1.025.This is as total noob thing. I am kinda embarrassed to be honest. Totally self inflicted.
The long story:
So me in my infinite wisdom decided that I needed to bring the salinity back up by adding about how much I lost via the skimmer with a higher salinity water. Now how much saltwater ? I was looking at calculators (you might guess where this is going). Anyway most are in PPT and I have been measuring S.G. . I took a quick look at changing my Hanna salinity meter but it was not a simple menu choice so I abandoned that idea for now and went on my way.
I added new saltwater per the calculator , waited and measured. It was at 1.028 and I freaked. (I really had not added much water yet in hindsite) Me in my infinite wisdom, proceeded to scoop out water and let the ATO fill in fresh. I measured it a few times along the way. After about a gallon I thought dilution cant be this much. It seemed like a lot of water was coming out and the salinity measured at different parts of the tank were still high?
Then I remembered I was mucking with changing S.G. to PPT uuuug ;Facepalm. I took out my backup and took a reading. 1.023. (I did just the opposite of what I wanted to. ) I must have hit the calibration and cleared it. I recalibrated the meter and it is reading properly now. I have a choice to do a water change to get it to 10.25 or to fill the ato with saltwater and let it raise slowly.
What is the best way to correct this ?
This is the meter I have