Trouble getting my magnesium up.

vlangel · Mar 10, 2014

Hi all, lately I've had a little trouble getting my magnesium levels up in my 36g. Probably for at least the last 2 weeks its been in the 1000-1100 range. I'll confess that I only checked it like once a month if my alkalinity and PH were ok. However 3-3-14 I had a big drop in alkalinity, around 5 dKH. I use 2 part so I dosed plus I was killing off a hitchhiking aptasia with kalkwasser and that brought up the alkalinity just fine. I noticed the magnesium was down then too and I've been dosing it as well but its not recovering nearly as fast. This morning it was around 1100 and I am dosing 10 ml a day or every other day. The tank never looked better but I'm surprised that the levels are so slow to come up.

Reefing Madness · Mar 10, 2014

Mag is the tough one to get to come up once its down. Raise you dosing to ever day. And you can bring the levels up to raising the number by 100 a day. It also takes a lot to get it to budge.

vlangel · Mar 10, 2014

Reefing Madness said:
Mag is the tough one to get to come up once its down. Raise you dosing to ever day. And you can bring the levels up to raising the number by 100 a day. It also takes a lot to get it to budge.

Thanks, that's good to know. Once I get it up I'll be more attentive to it in the future.

mike007 · Mar 10, 2014

You need to figure out how much calcium, alkalinity are being consumed each day. Once you get these parameters stable the you can tweak your magnesium to get It where you want It.
One good thing about magnesium Is you can raise quickly without adverse effects . But these other elements have to be corrected if needed.

vlangel · Mar 11, 2014

mike007 said:
You need to figure out how much calcium, alkalinity are being consumed each day. Once you get these parameters stable the you can tweak your magnesium to get It where you want It.
One good thing about magnesium Is you can raise quickly without adverse effects . But these other elements have to be corrected if needed.

That's what I think threw everything off in the first place. My tank was using very little calcium and alkalinity until just recently and the little it was using was being replenished by the 10% weekly WCs. I'm thinking with the recent big drop in alkalinity and some what smaller drop in calcium my LPS and clam are consuming more than the WCs will compensate for. In the last few months I've added some acans that do seem to be growing along with a new torch. Fortunately I have the alkalinity and calcium within range so the magnesium shouldn't be too bad if I keep picking at it.☺

beaslbob · Mar 11, 2014

IME it takes a lot of dosing to raise magnesium. On my old 55g I added 3 pounds or so of epsom salts to raise mag from 800 to 1350.

You might want to take a look at the stickies here with the on line calculator to determine how much you have to add.

my .02

marvelousone · Mar 11, 2014

What are you using to raise you mag. I was having the same problem. I raised and stabled my alk then started raise mag. calcium was low but when I got those two then calcium came up. I used liquid mag. From kent. It was not doing the job. I finally made up a gallon of mag chloride and mag sulfate from BRS. With in 4 days mag was at 1400. I dose 2 part and now alk is at 10.4 and 3 days after mag was raised calcium is now 430. My mag was very low for over a month. Once I started this it took, 1 week to get levels where I wanted them. Hope this helps. It is the way I did it.

b_rad_G · Mar 12, 2014

Assuming a 30g capacity using kent tech m to raise from 1000 to 1400 you need about 648.9ml. That is bout 22oz. It will take a long time to bring it up at 10 ml per day. You can dose about 160 ml per day safely....about 5.5 oz.

Or you can just do like me and start pouring....count to 3 and stop! On second ****.....don't do that

vlangel · Mar 12, 2014

I am using Kent tech m. I was just reading what the bottle said which is where I got the 10ml/day. I guess from what I am hearing from everyone is it is safe to dose more mag if everything else is in range. I will increase my dosage. I am running out of part c of my Red Sea mag test kit so I don't want to go too hog wild since I can't test at the moment. LFS has a new one on order.