Dosing your mixing tank

[MONTANTK]

Currently I am using the blue bucket of Red Sea. Overall I’m pretty happy with it and I have gotten good results but the Alk is a little lower than where I would like to keep my tank (8.5dkh). When I do a water change it drops it to around 7.8. Is it common practice to dose your mixing tank to your desired levels?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Currently I am using the blue bucket of Red Sea. Overall I’m pretty happy with it and I have gotten good results but the Alk is a little lower than where I would like to keep my tank (8.5dkh). When I do a water change it drops it to around 7.8. Is it common practice to dose your mixing tank to your desired levels?

Not alk, no, but it is OK to add a little baking soda if it is clearly needed.

I cannot see how you are getting that big of a drop. Maybe your salinity in the salt is too low. They claim 8 dKH at 35 ppt.

Even if the salt mix is 7 dKH and you do a 20% change, 8.5 dKH only becomes 8.2 dKH.

 

[MONTANTK]

Not alk, no, but it is OK to add a little baking soda if it is clearly needed.

I cannot see how you are getting that big of a drop. Maybe your salinity in the salt is too low. They claim 8 dKH at 35 ppt.

Even if the salt mix is 7 dKH and you do a 20% change, 8.5 dKH only becomes 8.2 dKH.

I think I neglected an important part of the situation for my own understanding. I had dKH of 8.4, I did a water change while also scaling down my dosing and it dropped to 8.1. Don’t see where I got 7.8 from. Also in that time I was messing around with my water volume but wasn’t changing my dosing accordingly. So really a drop from 8.4 to 8.1 seems normal considering I’m adding about 15% of 8dKH water and my tank consumes about 0.2Dkh a day.