Dosing with regular water changes?

[wonroc]

New to dosing so please lend some education.

When doing regular water changes every 2 weeks of 10\15 % do we really need to dose calcium for lps or inverts? Using marine tropical salt. Should the newly changed salt replenish the minerals?

 

[Rjmul]

New to dosing so please lend some education.

When doing regular water changes every 2 weeks of 10\15 % do we really need to dose calcium for lps or inverts? Using marine tropical salt. Should the newly changed salt replenish the minerals?

Honestly depends on what your parameters test at. I've found it EASIEST to base your parameters around what your salt mixes at. And then dosing to keep it there. The water changes should (in a perfect world) do "nothing" kind of ?
That's kind of how it works in my brain.

 

[A sea K]

Honestly depends on what your parameters test at. I've found it EASIEST to base your parameters around what your salt mixes at. And then dosing to keep it there. The water changes should (in a perfect world) do "nothing" kind of ?
That's kind of how it works in my brain.

While I agree if your maintaining the big 3 (alk calc and mag) with dosing. What does not get dosed (trace elements) will get a boost with regular water changes. I dose to maintain my tanks alk calc and mag at or near my salt mix levels, I keep a 5% weekly w/c schedule to manage my trace elements.

 

[Big E]

In my early days I had a 75g tank filled with mainly LPS and religiously changed 10% a week and the corals grew so fast I had to move everything into a 180g tank in less than a year.

This was before there were good test kits to measure levels and I had no clue what the targets were.

You can probably get away with it in smaller tanks without dosing but it would make sense to test and keep levels up. The only way you're going to know is to try it a track alk-calc as you go.