My new calcium chloride

[mcarroll]

Got mine from BJ's wholesale club. Last time I got it it was in a bucket under the Berkeley and Jensen brand. It's still the same product name but the brand is no longer BJ's house bran, it's SWI, Inc of Kansas. Still made in the USA, which should imply known purity levels.

I have really liked using a commercial two-part, and have several months' worth of two-part left to use up, in fact.

But now that this is available to me at the wholesale club again, it is so much cheaper that I really cannot afford not to use it once the commercial product runs out.

 

[Reefersutherland_]

How much is it for that big bag and how do u think u will know how many pellets to get the right concentration? Thanks

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Unfortunately, I cannot tell if it is pure enough from the packaging, but if you have been using it successfully, that's good to know!

 

[mcarroll]

How much is it for that big bag and how do u think u will know how many pellets to get the right concentration? Thanks

I will do some testing to verify its concentration before loading up the dosers, but I substitute directly for the anhydrous calcium chloride in the reef chemistry calculator.

$18

Unfortunately, I cannot tell if it is pure enough from the packaging, but if you have been using it successfully, that's good to know!

I guess at the end of the day it's nothing more than hearsay, but some years ago I talked to a guy at Tetra Chemicals - he told me there's only one (active?) calcium chloride mine in United States so all of the calcium chloride (like Peladow) that comes from the United States is the same base purity.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

That's possible. I don't really have any info on that, aside from the fact that when I tested Dowflake, it matched impurity profile to some hobby brands, some of which carried higher purity assurance grades.

 

[mcarroll]

some of which carried higher purity assurance grades.

Wow! I didn't remember that wrinkle to the testing - thanks for bringing that up!

The only "beef" I can claim after using the first 50 pounds is the "rusty" residue that's generated by dissolving it in water. It didn't hurt anything as far as I could tell, but it made handling a little bit of a pain.

Filtering it takes way too long, but I did not know what I was doing. My half-solution was to simply let the doser suck up the little bit of material around the feed tube and just not worry about it. It appeared that the remaining 99% of the brownish material would just sit there inertly anyway. Ugly, but didn't seem to hurt anything one way or the other.

The only hard clue I've been able to find related is that for use in brining, I found a document that specified dissolving the calcium chloride and leaving the brownish solids behind to make it of acceptable purity.

Brining solution is (so far as I know) an external treatment for fruits and veggies, so not exactly consumable (I'm not sure there's even a residue of calcium chloride left in some use cases)...but food grade, as in for use on food.

That does nothing to explain what the brown residue is, of course.

I'd be interested in hearing any good methods for filtering or otherwise dealing with the brownish residue.