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!