New Life Spectrum fish food and copper

[midgetwaiter]

Originally Posted by fishytime

See this is what Im getting at....a little bit here, a little bit there...a little bit in the food and suddenly its not such a little amount anymore.

Okay math time.

A toxic dose of copper is about .4 ppm

So say we have a 50g (190L) tank we need 76mg of copper to get to that point.

According to my Reef Trace bottle it has .032mg copper per ml.

So it would take 2375ml of Reef Trace to get to a toxic Level. That's 2.375L or .625g

If you follow the directions for on the bottle you would be dosing 12.5ml twice a week. So that's .4mg of Copper per dose. It would take 190 doses in order to get a toxic level of copper if you had no water changes or uptake by inhabitants. 95 weeks of dosing.

So let's say we are using Tropic Marin salt. According to the AWT salt study we have an average of .03mg/l of copper to start with. That's 5.7mg of copper in our 50g tank.

We add .8mg every week with our Reef Trace. Double that because maybe we are using Reef Plus too. Assume that the NLS adds twice as much as the Reef Trace just for fun and we have a total addition of 3.2mg per week.

Starting with 5.7mg from the salt and adding with this seriously ridiculous 3.2mg / week it would take 22 weeks to get to 76mg of copper if we had no export or uptake at all.

It's impossible.