Greetings all,
I've been using the cheap instant ocean salt in my sps reef tank for 3 year now. Briefly, i have a red sea reefer 250; I only dose ESV B-ionic to maintain parameters... i don't dose anything else (no coral foods or additives), but i do have a healthy bioload and i feed my fish 3 times a day.
My tank generally does well, but every time i visited my local fish store, i wondered about switching to one of the fancier more expensive brands of salt. The grass always seems greener on the other side, and i kept fantasizing about getting better sps growth and color on the more expensive salts... about 6 month ago, i bit the bullet and purchased the most expensive salt in my LFS, Tropic Marin Reef Pro. To avoid shocking my system, i gradually changed over my tank from the cheap instant ocean to Tropic Marin by doing gradual 2.5 L water changes plus 15 L every other weekend.
I documented the change in coral colors by taking before and after pics, and i also did ICP tests before and after the switch... this change over is documented here if you want to see it
Briefly, i found no major differences in how my corals looked. Levels of major and trace elements were essentially the same, although for a couple of elements, levels were a bit higher with the cheaper IO.
While this is not obviously not a valid experiment by any stretch of the imagination (sample size of 1, no biological replication, limited control of confounding factors), i am hoping that my anecdote can be of help to the community...
p.s. my trial is different from the fun trials BRS did on salts recently - mostly because they didn't focus on how different salt brands actually affect performance of corals in your tank - something that is of primary importance to me.
I've been using the cheap instant ocean salt in my sps reef tank for 3 year now. Briefly, i have a red sea reefer 250; I only dose ESV B-ionic to maintain parameters... i don't dose anything else (no coral foods or additives), but i do have a healthy bioload and i feed my fish 3 times a day.
My tank generally does well, but every time i visited my local fish store, i wondered about switching to one of the fancier more expensive brands of salt. The grass always seems greener on the other side, and i kept fantasizing about getting better sps growth and color on the more expensive salts... about 6 month ago, i bit the bullet and purchased the most expensive salt in my LFS, Tropic Marin Reef Pro. To avoid shocking my system, i gradually changed over my tank from the cheap instant ocean to Tropic Marin by doing gradual 2.5 L water changes plus 15 L every other weekend.
I documented the change in coral colors by taking before and after pics, and i also did ICP tests before and after the switch... this change over is documented here if you want to see it
Briefly, i found no major differences in how my corals looked. Levels of major and trace elements were essentially the same, although for a couple of elements, levels were a bit higher with the cheaper IO.
While this is not obviously not a valid experiment by any stretch of the imagination (sample size of 1, no biological replication, limited control of confounding factors), i am hoping that my anecdote can be of help to the community...
p.s. my trial is different from the fun trials BRS did on salts recently - mostly because they didn't focus on how different salt brands actually affect performance of corals in your tank - something that is of primary importance to me.
Your corals will love you even more.
