Salinity drifted down

[kateJD]

So… sorry for another newbie question but I just noticed (after recalibrating my refractometer and buying a Hannah salinity pen) that my salinity is much lower than I thought it was (I thought it was 34-35, and it’s actually around 30 ppt).

so my plan is to correct this with a series of water changes with 40 ppt saline over a few weeks but I’m trying to decide if this happened while I was setting up my ATO and kept playing with it to make sure it worked (it sure didn’t seem like I was adding _THAT_ much water) or if maybe I had made a mistake from the beginning or if now that I have fish and I’m using some tank water here and there for testing and food, if that’s adding up? It can’t be more than 2-4oz a day.

FWIW the tank is a 6 week old Red Sea max E260 (69gallon) AIO. Protein skimmer is running pretty dry, and the system is stocked really lightly (2 clownfish, a cleaner shrimp, 8 variety snails, 1fighting conch and a little gsp and Xenia)

 

[Rick's Reviews]

In my opinion if you do water changes you will be removing salt in your aquarium so you will need to add salt with new water mix, water evaporates quicker then salt, (salt accumulates on my fish gaurd) so it does slightly decrease, I do a water change every 2 weeks, at a guess 30%, all new water and salt mix I check with refractometer per load to ensure close to what I need.
After water change I leave 2 inch from full capacity of water in my aquarium, leave about 1-2hours, check salinity after this time then top up accordingly/adjusting either way.

 

[gbroadbridge]

So… sorry for another newbie question but I just noticed (after recalibrating my refractometer and buying a Hannah salinity pen) that my salinity is much lower than I thought it was (I thought it was 34-35, and it’s actually around 30 ppt).

so my plan is to correct this with a series of water changes with 40 ppt saline over a few weeks but I’m trying to decide if this happened while I was setting up my ATO and kept playing with it to make sure it worked (it sure didn’t seem like I was adding _THAT_ much water) or if maybe I had made a mistake from the beginning or if now that I have fish and I’m using some tank water here and there for testing and food, if that’s adding up? It can’t be more than 2-4oz a day.

FWIW the tank is a 6 week old Red Sea max E260 (69gallon) AIO. Protein skimmer is running pretty dry, and the system is stocked really lightly (2 clownfish, a cleaner shrimp, 8 variety snails, 1fighting conch and a little gsp and Xenia)

Use 35ppt water for your ATO topup water instead of RODI until the salinity is correct.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I agree that topping off with salt water is a much better plan than trying to make hypersaline water, which will cost more and may cause precipitation of certain materials such as calcium carbonate.