Added water to salt... oops

[mattvd]

Hello all - I'm new here and excited to get into the reefing hobby.

5 days ago, on Monday, I excitedly started to fill my tank with my RO system. I thought it would just be easier to pre-measure all of the salt needed for my 120 gallon aquarium, and add it all to the bottom of the tank, then add the RO water directly to the tank.

Nope.

After doing some research, I realized that this was a mistake.

I thought that the tank cloudiness and milkiness was just because the salt still needed time to circulate and get dissolved. So I had my powerheads running for about two days mixing the water in the aquarium, and the water was still milky.

Doing some research, I figured out that you're not supposed to mix the water for this long. I turned my powerheads off and let everything settle and the water has indeed started to clear up. Only problem is, that now there is a lot of white, salt-like, particles on the bottom of the aqaurium. Initially, I thought this was salt that still had not been dissolved, but from doing some research it sounds like it might be calcium that has built up due to how I initially added the water to salt. Some other forums have said that it is impossible to dissolve this calcium into the water.

So my question is - how can I get rid of this calcium at the bottom of my tank? Everytime I try to mix it into the water, the water gets cloudier and cloudier. The calcium is almost blanketing the bottom of the tank and is building up. Will try to add pictures to the comments here

 

[Breadman03]

It's called precipitate. Basically, the water was too concentrated to prevent various minerals from bonding to each other. I'm not aware of any practical methods of seperating them back into solution.

If your calcium, alkalinity and magnesium test near normal ranges, you could just use a siphon to vacuum the precipitate out of the tank and roll with it. I doubt it will make much difference after a few water changes, especially since it sounds like you are just cycling your tank.

 

[aykwm]

Did you check the salinity of water? I noticed sometimes when following the instructions that the salinity is on the high side. Also in the main tank usually volume is 10-20% less (sometimes more than that) due to equipements, LR, sand and so on, so water might be too saline to dissolve the salt.

When I setup the tank, I mixed the salt 5-10 gallon at a time, it is time consuming, but it avoids all the headaches accompanied with mixing it in a DT.

 

[mattvd]

Thanks for the comments! yeah, the salinity was right at 1.028 - so the salinity seems fine, just general cloudiness and buildup at the bottom of the tank.

Have started to siphon out the precipitate at the bottom of the tank and it is already clearing up. Thanks!

 

[chipmunkofdoom2]

The precipitate is caused by calcium and carbonate joining together and precipitation out of solution. In mixed and natural seawater, magnesium prevents this from happening. However, since the salt mix is not necessarily homogeneous and because these elements dissolve at different rates, it's possible that calcium will find carbonate without magnesium interfering. You should test the carbonate alkalinity and calcium levels of the water. I would suspect they're low, as this is how the precipitate was formed.

If this was a smaller tank, I would play it safe and do a 100% water change. 120 gallons is a lot of water though. I would at the very least perform a 25% water change and ensure the calcium and carbonate levels are correct in the existing water.

 

[mattvd]

Thanks for the advice! Yeah, I'm going to bring the water into my LFS tomorrow for full testing. However in the meantime when siphoning out the precipitate I'm doing about a 30% water change. Hopefully all will be well soon.

 

[clsanchez77]

I would not overthink this. By adding salt first, you over concentrated various minerals and they precipitated out. You can test for these and then supplement the deficiencies or throw the water out and start over. Your choice.

Your next step will be to cycle the tank and during this cycle you will be changing a lot of water anyway. So you can do the water changes now but you will do them later anyway and soon enough. I would personally just correct the alkalinity, calcium and magnesium and go from there.

The precipitate is all inert and will mostly be calcium carbonate - so free sand! except you paid for it when bought the salt If you plan on adding sand, I would not worry about the precipitate.

Btw, 1.028 is slightly high. 1.0264 is natural sea water and most people maintain 1.024 to 1.026.

Honestly, not the worst first mistake one can make. If that's the best you have got so far, you are doing pretty good