I did an oop...

[Jdogg266]

I haven't really been on top of chemistry for the 6 months my tank has been set up. That is until recently, I noticed an explosion of growth in my tank more so with the SPS coral. So that set off a red flag to really take a look at what is going on. Here are the parameters.

Salinity 1.026
Magnesium 150ppm
Calcium 360ppm
Alkalinity 7.5 dkh

There is a lot of alarming stuff going on here I'm ngl. Yes, 150 ppm magnesium not 1500 ppm... can it even be that low?!?
(I used salifert test kits along with red sea. I am going to bring it to my LFS tmrw to see what their test kits say.)
I'm not about to dump an entire bottle of magnesium into my tank either. I'm really not THAT worried because everything looks fine.

This is why I have called together you, the people of r2r to help me. Give me your thoughts. Is this about to be the end of all life in my water box?

 

[jccaclimber]

It says you have an incorrect test result.

 

[jccaclimber]

I should followed that I can think of some extremely unlikely ways for that to happen, but they are so much less likely than a bad test they aren’t worth mentioning, particularly given your tank looking happy.
It might be interesting to see what results you get from. A test of fresh salt water as well as making a reference solution to sanity test, but doing nothing and having the LFS test are both excellent options at this point.

 

[legrunt]

Just to clarify... explosion of growth of...? Corals or algae?
I would mix a fresh batch of salt water, using your regular salt mix and test that, just to rule out testing error.

 

[Jdogg266]

Thanks guys, definitely gonna use that tip on testing fresh salt water from now on. My test kit I got from my bro expired back in 2017. Face palming rn.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Make sure you are not reading the kit/syringe backwards. If you use a large fraction of fluid in the syringe to get to the color change, the magnesium is not that low. To be that low means it hardly took any fluid added to get to the color change.

 

[legrunt]

Like he said. There are some syringes that start at 0 at the tip(as most syringes), but I have also seen some syringes in some test kits that start at 1 at the tip and goes to 0 at the flanges.