Hello Everyone,
I hope everybody had an amazing summer we can’t believe how fast it went and we are looking forward to the fall. On the East coast it was a very hot summer most days over 90 degrees, we where burning through ice packs on packing days!
We want to start a discussion here about magnesium. We noticed something that was amazing. We started dosing Magnesium a lot and the results have been insane.
Currently in one of our systems which is 560 Gallons We have not been dosing Mag. We didn’t have to dose mag or so we thought… We used to use the tropic Marin pro salt from Turkey which claims to have mag at 1380 and since we were doing weekly water changes of 15%, plus dosing esv ionic alc and calc which have some mag we didn’t dose it. Then we switch about 7 months ago to red sea Blue bucket, which is very low in mag. Over time we didn’t realize but our mag dropped to around 1325 and just stayed there for a few months. We didn’t think anything about it since we dose 125ML per day of ESV alk and 90 ML per day calc. There is some mag being dosed from that. So, for months we just let our mag stay at 1325. It didn’t move up or down so we though it was fine and stable.
Now here is the good part- We started dosing mag in this tank about 35 days ago. We have been dosing 180ML per day of esv Ionic and I know it sounds like a lot, but the mag has not changed. Which means the corals must be consuming it like crazy! One thing we did notice is our coralline algae started growing out of control. And when I mean out of control, I mean fully covered Frag racks within 30 days. around 35days ago we cleaned our frag racks and scrubbed off all the algae to get ready for a sale we where having, and now 35 days later the racks are completely covered in Coraline. See pics attached. We also noticed that the front glass is completely now caked in coralline and the bottom of the tank with no sand is completely covered.
We believe this is from dosing the mag. So, we tried it in a second system, and guess what? It produced the same results. In conclusion if you think your corals are not growing fast enough start dosing mag. If your mag is hovering around 1325-1350, I bet your tank is mag deficient. We found that once it drops it just kind of stays at a low level and doesn’t get lower. We challenge you to try this and report back your results. Also don’t worry about overdosing mag because it takes a lot to get the tank saturated. Since we started dosing the 180 ML per day our mag has not gone up the tank just consumes it. (See attached our triton Screenshot you will see the mag has barely moved.
We will continue to dose mag and see if we can raise it and get a sweet spot. In the meantime, we are loving the coralline and increased coral growth.
Please click the below link for a dosing tool so you know how much mag to dose.
Please share your results over the next 30 days if you try this.
Happy reefing everyone!
