Maximum salinity

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SeymourDuncan

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What is the maximum salinity I can mix water without creating hypo salinity cloudiness with Reef Crystals?
I want to have a concentrated salt mix on hand for when I need saltwater fast. I already have a 30g tote full of premix that is the exact salinity of my reef but sometimes I need a little more.
Any ideas?
 
Top Shelf Aquatics
Don't really understand your question you are asking. If its the max salinty i would say 1.026.
 
BRS
He wants to know how high he can keep the salinity in his stored saltwater. That way, he stores less volume of the high salinity water. When he needs to add saltwater, he adds RODI a portion of the stored water to get the right salinity.

To answer your question, I have no idea. LOL!! When I run short, like when I discard more than the prepared saltwater, I have no problems making a small batch. I just pour it back and forth between buckets, aerating and mixing at the same time. It may not be the right temperature, but it's ready in minutes. I do 20 gallon water changes in a 200 gallon system, and if the shortage is small, like maybe a gallon or less, I just go ahead and make it up with plain RODI. With that volume dilution, the refractometer cannot detect a change, and neither do the coral. BTW, I use Reef Crystals, too, and have been doing so for over 3 years.
 
Yeah, you asked my question much more clearly than I did haha. My goal is supreme laziness. I have neglected my end of the household "chores" so my woman is getting on me about that...its for the good of these innocent animals! Lol. So if I can have a container of stuff I can dilute that would be so cool. And it will also be plumbed into my existing water station so I don't have to pick anything up besides measurements of salt when I mix initially. It would even come in hand with making large batches. Just fill the reservoir with both salt concentrate and. rO all at once and turn the dump valve and call it a day.
 
I've "accidentally" mixed my saltwater up to 1.035 ...... not with reef crystals but I didn't get any precip of anything.....
 
Deltec
www.dinkinsaquaticgardens.com
It is an extra step, technically. But i thing having salt concentrate would mix faster in the water than dry salt, as long as the condensed solution is still clear.
Im also trying to see how much dissolves without the precipitation. I haven't got around to trying yet, got pretty busy this week. :/ got carried away and now I'm working on a frag tank lol.

One time I mixed the salt and water in reverse order and got my first taste of hypo salinity, the salt wouldn't dissolve for days so I filtered all the water through coffee filters. It was my learning days for sure.
 
You don’t want to mix any more concentrated than you wish to use (with reef salts.) The reason is precipitation of calcium carbonate. This is the reason that they say to mix salt only when you have the full dose of water. Also, if you believe the vitamin voodoo with some salts, you also don’t want to store them for really any additional time. Some vitamins have relatively poor stability in solution.
 
Tidal Gardens
I think people are getting confused because you're using hyposaline wrong. It sounds like you mean hypersaline. See this hypolink for more info: Hyper and Hypo
 
Yeah, your right. I did use hypo and not hyper, lol. I could have sworn i typed that backwards. My deepest apologies.

I get what your saying about the precip. I had to ask though, since the idea was in my head and I haven't got around to experimenting.

With much consideration you guys are all right. There won't be much added benefit regardless if it were to condense into a HYPER saline solution, and the issues seem to outweigh the worth of a test. Looks like ill be doing
It how I do it :)

I guess the only real way would be to boil the saltwater, which would condense it...but then it wouldn't be very useful for an aquarium with alot of the good stuff most likely boiling out.

Another option would be to use lobster salt as the concentrate, and add the needed chemicals later like some farmers and pet stores do on new systems to save money (lobster salt, not condensed hyper saline). This would be more work than necessary.

Just putting out some possibilities for the world. Maybe in the future this will help scientists design a salt that can be used how I want? Someone thought of going to the moon once so we did. Haha. Anything is possible some day.
 
Just a thought from what I think I remember being taught in chemistry at some point... Once you get really close to the max solubility changes in temperature of the water are going to effect it. If it gets too cold it could fall out of solution.
 
Avast
If you were to take out all the “extra stuff” that is in reef salts and got down to just plain old salt, you would be able to make up to about a 25% salt solution (saturated salt solution.) Currently we are typically making 3.5% salt solutions for our tanks.

SeymourDuncan said:
I guess the only real way would be to boil the saltwater, which would condense it...but then it wouldn't be very useful for an aquarium with a lot of the good stuff most likely boiling out.
Click to expand...

When you boil saltwater, the only thing that is boiled away is water. All the inorganic ingredients stay in the remaining solution.
 
Swine said:
Just a thought from what I think I remember being taught in chemistry at some point... Once you get really close to the max solubility changes in temperature of the water are going to effect it. If it gets too cold it could fall out of solution.
Click to expand...

This is true, but raising the temperature will allow the chemicals back in. It's a question of kinetics though. Some of them might take quite a while to go back into solution at tank temperatures, calcium carbonate being one.
 
Very interesting stuff! I was trying to look for information that would apply to this but not having much luck at all. Mostly I found water softener applicable research but nothing that plain specifies how much pure salt can be dissolved in water, let alone the salt we use with its added ingredients. I wish I was into this hobby when I took chemistry, I could have just made my teacher do all the work lol. Definitely got the lowest possible passing grade in that class. So many elements and all their combinations lol...it was too much. A 10th grade art student should not be required to know how to name any combination of elements from a glob of letters and exponents. I couldn't even get Spanish down...
 
www.dinkinsaquaticgardens.com
salinity is one test i do regularly, it's very important and easy to read if you have a good instrument. skipping on this may lead to probs
 

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