I wouldn't say I am a beginner with salt water I have been in the hobby for about 3-4yrs. now but I have just in the past year began to get more serious about the hobby and began reasearching a lot, and realized I really didn't know anything but what I was told by the LFS (which wasn't a lot).
I am starting a new 180gal system soon so I am sure you all are going to get sick of all my questions!
My question for tonight is about salt mix for my current 90 gal tank. I have been using oceanic since I started my system. I have recently read that this is not a very good mix and decided to switch to Red sea coral pro(a mix that many people recommended to me).
Does anyone have input on either of these mixes? Also should I expect any negative affects on my live stock by switching them to a different salt mix after using the same one for many years?
Thanks for any help!
I've been a long time Oceanic salt mix user and the only issue I had with it was it was sometimes low on alkalinity (but since carbonate uptake by my corals is high I have to supplement carbonates anyway no matter what brand I use).
It's been awhile since I've been able to find it online so I've switched brands since then.
Is your 180gal set up going to be a reef tank or FOWLR? If the latter I would think it probably doesn't matter much which brand you use.
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African cichlid and saltwater aquariums
If you are planning on having corals, I would definitely make the switch to Red Sea Coral Pro. I am planning on starting a SW tank with corals as well and I plan on using Red Sea Coral Pro.
I think you have to slowly make the change in salt water when switching brands. I may be wrong though but perhaps someone will advise on how to do so.
Yes, I do want to attempt some easier species of coral in my new 180 so I think I will go ahead and go for red sea coral pro. And it won't be an all at once change for my current fish because I'm going to start using it in my 90 gal that I have now. So it will be added in small quantities each week for the H2O change.
Thanks for the feedback!
Mixing different brands of salt mix used to commonly result in serious problems, but nowadays it's usually not such a biggie anymore. The old problem was that the different brands used widely different formulas to acheive the end result. If you mixed two brands, you could wind up putting two ingredient compounds together, one from each brand, that would react with each other in some disastrous way.
Today's mixes are chemically much more similar to each other, so that risk is considerably lessened. Once fully mixed, the resuling water is pretty much the same from brand to brand, so if you fully mixed water from 2 different brands, you'll only be mixing two very similar waters, and that's fine.
EDIT: Just don't mix two different brands of dry salt together!!
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