Well I bought a 7 pound bag for calcium, one for alk, and one for mg. So those ought to last for quite a while, especially the magnesium. Also I got the red sea foundation test kit, which I'd probably recommend to anybody doing reefing. Seems like those 3 things are pretty important so you gotta have them, especially if you aren't doing water changes but you'd still need them even if you did. Also you need to be able to test for those 3 things...and actually do a good job of testing them probably every week or so unless you feel like you have a good program going. But reef tanks are dynamic and don't take a set amount of elements per period of time. I wish there was a better way to monitor your calc, alk, and mg levels but so far I haven't found such a thing.
My calc measurement didn't go so well. It's either 500 or the test is wrong, neither of which are great results. I'm gonna try it again tomorrow since I just got it and it had been in the cold in the mail. The alkalinity I got was about 7, so a little more neutral than I'd like but not sure what to do about that tbh. Also not sure that I should do anything about that. The only good result was my magnesium which read 1400 which is exactly what I wanted to see.
Still working on a way to manage these 3 elements better. But for now it's 3 teaspoons of soda ash every other day, probably 3 teaspoons of calcium every other day, and I'm not sure what I'm gonna do about magnesium. Still haven't been able to determine what the deal is with magnesium, whether it even gets consumed or not. Certainly to a lesser extent than the other 2 though.
