Changing Salt

[nuhabit]

OK I'm thinking of changing from Coralife sea salt to Reef Crystals. What is the proper procedure if any to do this. I've been using Coralife for 3 yrs now.

 

[mnat]

Go slow, don't shock your system. How often and what percentage do you do water changes?

 

[falconut]

Exactly. When I switched my salt mix, I started by mixed the salt for my water changes. Of course I was only doing about 10%. Then after I ran out of the old, my changes were done with just the new.

 

[NewJerseyReefer]

I just switched to RC about 3 weeks ago and i fell in love with there salt easy to mix. But what mnat said before you take it slow when you change salt you may shock all your fish(s) while changing to a new salt.

 

[nuhabit]

I change 35g every other week. 200G system so 17%. So maybe 20G every week which will increase the overall amount of water change. This will also work on a nitrate problem I'm tinkering with. Does that sound like a shock because I'm not thinking so

 

[mnat]

That is the thought, go slow and steady. By doing smaller ones every week you should be able to ease your way into it. You can also test your system as far as alk, calc, and mag go and test the newly mixed salt water to see if they are way off. If they are then you might want to go even slower, like 5%

 

[nuhabit]

So I finally picked up the Reef Crystal so here I go with 20G a week for awhile. My nitrates seem to be coming down with only 500ml of P/N bio pellets in the reactor. Since I started the pellets with a quarter of recommended pellets no bloom occured. The last time I tried pellets I killed a lot of coral. 1000ml of TLF pellets all at once is not good. Atleast it didnt turn out good for me.