I will be in Aldergrove this Friday and can pick up a sample of the salt for testing if Vancity wants to meet after the weekend. I've been using IO salt and I know & respect spitfire's years of reefing experience. If we can have the salt tested by the company and have a definitive answer as to what parameter is off, that would ease my mind and the minds of a lot of other reefers. Just putting this offer out there. I can meet you at Oceanic if you want.

Thanks,

Anthony

Just send me a text if you figure it out Anthony, If Tyler hasn't thrown it out yet

I have a new unopened bucket of IO from King ED, if you want a little for comparison testing.
I have used IO since I started reefing 3 years ago and have never had any issues so far so good.

My biggest fear is waking up 1 morning to everything wiped. So sorry it happened to U. This is why I won't go all out on my tank Cuz it can be dead the next day. Damn. Please try to find the problem so we all can try to avoid

You could FedEx a sample to me. Just stick it in a bag and print off a shipping label...FedEx will come pick it up from your house and even put it in a box for you. I'll pay for it. Pm me if that's what you want to do.

That's an even easier solution. Thanks Myka.

Now who's making an ass out of u and me?

With no testing done, experience is irrelevant.

I think it's actually important to test this salt, many of us trust IO and have for a decade or more.

So before this gets out of hand due to mis understandings of intent and assumptions let me clarify and revise my thoughts and offer a suggestion to CanReef members and mods.

This was meant as a joke and not an attack. If I have offended you or anyone else I am sorry for that.

I agree 100%. Testing is very important and will reveal a lot. An expert witness relies on their experience and also testing to back up their opinion. It was wrong of me to assume that straight experience was enough, no matter how much experience a person has.

I agree.

My suggestion for community members and CanReef mods is this. Unless there is actual tests that reveal a problem with a product there should be no negative posts about that product. Mods should watch out for these posts and delete them as they occur.

Back to work...lunch breaks over. LoL

Why not to use io salt
 

Hey Tim don't worry too much, he just likes to stir the pot every chance he gets. If you read back thru his posts many, many are just stirring the pot. It gets old quick.

Hi Dave,

I understand but I wanted to make sure there was no mis understandings or hurt feelings. As well I have corrected my belief that an Expert Witness uses testing to verify their conclusions, not just their experience. So I needed to apologize and revise my position as it's changed due to the thread.

Cheers,
Tim

I don't really see how there is any pot stirring here.

Sometimes, people have 2 different opinions and they talk it out to see if there is a mutual understanding possible.

Here above, TimT agreed with my statements, and I took no offense whatsoever to his.

His referral to making an ass out of u and me was tongue in cheek, as was mine.

I merely found his statement contradictory and pointed that out.

if you go onto an online forum and share your opinion, you really should be comfortable with others sharing theirs...whether they agree with you or not.

Seems like quite a few members were saying that testing should be required before any conclusions made...including TimT.

Dave, maybe you can shed some light on why you felt I needed to be singled out out of all of those who shared their opinions.

PM please if you care to to keep this thread on topic.

Tyler (Spitfire) where are you? I Pm'd yesterday but no reply, I've seen you online...
Totally understand if you're over it and don't wanna think about anymore, you lost a bucket full of coral and that sucks...

However, unless you started this thread for the intention bad mouthing IO and then walking away from this you really aren't doing this any good by staying out of it. Testing and finding a conclusion to this mishap is intriguing, I'd love to know what went wrong and what to look out for. Batch #? Where did you buy it? I assume you no longer work for a retailer that sells this salt?

If salt alone nuked one of my tanks I'd be ****ed, but I'd definitely want some answers, or was it user error...

Having bad day at work and was grumpy, should have just PM'd Tim and told him to not take it personally.
Bowing out.

User error unlikely given the op.

If it isn't the salt, it likely some outside factor.

Kids or some substance that accidentally got into the air or water or something that may never be known, unfortunately.

Tim, while I understand where you're coming from, I can't remove every post that suggests something is negative. The backlash is more than I would care to argue about.
These discussions always run a course. One person posts something, the burden of proof is then expected vocally by the community. Without the proof being presented, it's simply conjecture, and in the end, the product does not suffer (significant) harm.
We get one or two posts a year blaming salt for issues. They may or may not be true. Unless tampered with, the chances of a single bucket causing issues with no other reports, especially with a product so widely used, suggests that other things may have contributed. I'm not suggesting it wasn't salt, but without testing and subsequent proof, I'm not tossing out my IO salt.
I also get that Tyler doesn't want to keep chasing an issue that won't fix his problem, so we're not likely to get any resolve on this. In the end, it's a civil discussion that doesn't require censoring, IMO.

Man we're gonna miss your moderation.

+1

+2

Woo-hoo! Another post with math! :D

-1

+3 Brad
You have a great way of coming across very succinctly but still manage to keep it light

Oh, I'm not dumping my IO either

You're all jacking this thread. First warning. Still like me?? :razz:

Salt is gone, Albert was here when it happened, we did everything we could to diagnose the problem and came to the conclusion that it was the salt. We mixed the water earlier in the day with the same system I've been using for years. The system was mature and very stable. The inverts and corals started dieing within hours.

I still like you :)

Kids went home from the time salt was mixed till the next day

Why would you toss the salt without getting it tested?

why not toss the salt without getting it tested, sorry i do not have a mass-spectrometer nor intend on to pay for the testing that it would require to come to a definite conclusive result

I agree with Myka the salt should have been tested, now saying the tank was nuked by the IO salt is an opinion of you and Albert and all of us following your thread will now never have a conclusive answer as to the salt quality. Myka offered to bare the cost of testing it, so why wouldn't you do it, then at least we would have an answer.

+2

And +4 Brad :sad:

Oooh more numbers this thread needed.

1+2-1+3+2+4=11dkh??

I have some cheap coral and tank I can test the the salt out for you. If they all die too then for sure its the salt. As I am using instant salt myself too.

There is still no guarantee with you using his salt.
Too many variables to consider.

I agree with all other posts that state the salt needs to be tested under scrutiny/lab standards.
Only then can the problem be found.

I said before and will say it again.
I'm still going to use my IO for now.

Wellp, here are the events:

Crack new bucket. Mixed salt. Waited four hours. Did water change. Stuff got dead. Water tested normal for all testable parameters :D

Fish are happy. Corals look like they've had an abrasive pad applied to them liberally. It's really odd, not your regular RTN event. A lot of them kept polyps, but lost all surrounding tissue. All mollusk and echinoderms were pretty much dead withing a couple hours.

Maybe a better title for this thread would have been "I did a normal water change and wiped out my tank. I am speculating that the salt was the culprit - Or evil voodoo magic. 50/50"

And that's my concern. Why are we not blaming voodoo magic? I know I've lost more to that than I ever have with anything else. Of course, the possibility that the voodoo magic was in the salt needs to be considered. I really hate voodoo..sigh

However, on the testing front, unless alk is through the roof, there's not much we can test this side of a lab. Which IO would need to do, because none of us know what any particular value should be in the first place.

And, can a lab test for VM?? I dunno.

Pretty sure it takes some bat guano and eye of newt. Not sure where you might get eye of newt this time of year...

We have a forum member who works at a Lab just down the road from me.
Only thing is they are pricey. I think it's a minimum charge issue. I was quoted $250 for a bromine test, but that's what we paid for all our water quality tests at work.

I still have some in the freezer from the last VM test. I have bats around the house, but chasing around behind them is a bit tiring. Agile little beasts...

Problem is you'd need to run the voodoo salt AND a control batch to compare values to. So double the cost right there. And what to test for? Bromine? Adamantium? Voodoo?
A full spectrum test for everything that could be in salt, and for everything that shouldn't be in salt is going to run a big bill.

But nobody following this thread will ever know for sure without a test of the salt will they?
I will continue to use IO salt as nothing was conclusive proving bad salt was the "issue" here. I'll be doing a WC within a couple of days and we will see what happens if anything. :neutral:

And I will ask again, what is he supposed to test? Unless he contacts IO and they're willing to test and can find something in the test panel that is off, we still won't know, and a lot of trouble has been gone through to learn nothing.

I'm just honestly very curious as to what could do such rapid damage, that's more than just one parameter slightly over/under. That's some serious scorched reef.

The only thing I've had personally that caused a chain reaction like that was my GSP spawning which killed my snails (but not urchins, anemones or crabs.) which led to massive water quality issues. Took me a couple months to bring everything back. But it's not similar because it didn't really **** off the corals.

So we can safely say that Voodooo is the culprit. This thread should be renamed and should be buried into the archives with the verdict NOT GUILTY!