Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by wreck

ohhh man....... that is terrible.
i am using the fluval salt atm this kinda worries me a bit.

have you had any problems with it? I've never seen anything like what happened, the last bucket of this brand didn't do that, but I bought it almost a year ago. I don't know how else to describe the smell - I'm used to freshly mixed salt water having a very distinct smell, it's actually my favourite part of a water change. This batch smelled completely different. It didn't smell bad, just completely different.

I'm also used to salt being a little cloudy right after it's mixed, but this was so cloudy you couldn't see through the water change chamber of my sump, even though the doors on the other side of the cabinet were open and the light in the office was on. I let it stand for half an hour with a Koralia mixing it and it never cleared. The only thing I can think is that the salt maybe wasn't mixed very well and there was an insane precipitation reaction? One of my angriest acros looks like it has white powder all over it

Originally Posted by Aquattro

Do you have enough of that left in the bin to test alk?

You mean of the new water? No, I do water changes (including mixing of the salt) out of a special chamber in my sump, so 100% of what I make ends up in the tank. It's a brand new bucket of salt though, so I'm going to make a couple gallons now and test it.

FWIW, I tested alk and calcium immediately following the water change. The 48-ish gallon water change only raised alk in the tank by 0.15 dKH and it didn't change the calcium level. In perspective, a half cup of Tropic Marin part B solution mixd to the recommended concentration raises my tank's dKH by 0.36.

If the salt was mixed badly and there was a lot of carbonate precipitate in it, would that have been enough to make the corals angry do you think?