Hello! i just started my first reef tank. Specs:
35L (9,2 gallon) of water + 10Kg (22 pounds) AquaMedic Coral sand 0-2mm (pure aragonite) + 10Kg (22 pounds) dead spaghetti rock (pure calcium carbonate) + 1Kg live rock. I wanted to have a good amount of natural substrate for buffering and keeping calcium high.
I am using AquaForest Sea Salt at the 35 ppt proportion, which should give:
Temperature is averaging 24-26 °C from the start until now (two weeks). When I added the salt the first time, the next day the salinity was right (35 ppt). As the days went by, I refilled the tank to the initial level to compensate evaporation loss, with deionized water. Didn't bother checking salinity. After some 5 days, i checked salinity and BOOM it was down to 32.8 ppt, which meant I somehow lost 77 grams of salt! Since I left the lid off to cool the tank down, and the skimmer was making a lot of bubbles (had not broke-in yet), I noticed quite a few fine splashing of water out of the tank. I blamed it (even though the salt loss was colossal) and replenished it with a very strong salt solution to reach 35 ppt again (slowly, of course).
But I continued losing salinity daily. I had to start compensating evaporation loss with saltwater, but even then the salinity kept dropping. During all this time, alkalinity was about 6-7 dK, even though it should be 8,3 - 8,9 according to AquaForest. pH is hovering a little below 8,0, but since I am still ciclying nitrogen I thought it was because of that.
Today I moved some of the rocks around, and I realized that the part that was buried into the sand had a whitish salt precipitate:
Could it be that where my salt is? If so, is it sodium chloride or calcium carbonate? Is it possible that all the natural rock and sand I added are dissolving so much calcium carbonate into the water and causing it to precipitate? What do you think?
35L (9,2 gallon) of water + 10Kg (22 pounds) AquaMedic Coral sand 0-2mm (pure aragonite) + 10Kg (22 pounds) dead spaghetti rock (pure calcium carbonate) + 1Kg live rock. I wanted to have a good amount of natural substrate for buffering and keeping calcium high.
I am using AquaForest Sea Salt at the 35 ppt proportion, which should give:
Temperature is averaging 24-26 °C from the start until now (two weeks). When I added the salt the first time, the next day the salinity was right (35 ppt). As the days went by, I refilled the tank to the initial level to compensate evaporation loss, with deionized water. Didn't bother checking salinity. After some 5 days, i checked salinity and BOOM it was down to 32.8 ppt, which meant I somehow lost 77 grams of salt! Since I left the lid off to cool the tank down, and the skimmer was making a lot of bubbles (had not broke-in yet), I noticed quite a few fine splashing of water out of the tank. I blamed it (even though the salt loss was colossal) and replenished it with a very strong salt solution to reach 35 ppt again (slowly, of course).
But I continued losing salinity daily. I had to start compensating evaporation loss with saltwater, but even then the salinity kept dropping. During all this time, alkalinity was about 6-7 dK, even though it should be 8,3 - 8,9 according to AquaForest. pH is hovering a little below 8,0, but since I am still ciclying nitrogen I thought it was because of that.
Today I moved some of the rocks around, and I realized that the part that was buried into the sand had a whitish salt precipitate:
Could it be that where my salt is? If so, is it sodium chloride or calcium carbonate? Is it possible that all the natural rock and sand I added are dissolving so much calcium carbonate into the water and causing it to precipitate? What do you think?
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