New tank, Calcium and mag high

[tristanfish]

hello all:


Tank size: 34 gallon
Sump: 10 gallon
Age: 4 months
Water: started off with nutri-sea water and now using ESV salt (rodi water)
Corals: lps
-Barney acantho, dendros, shrooms (jaws, tye dye, wwc bounce, champagne bounce and few more bounces, zoas (all sorts, sunny d's utters to name a couple, wellso, scoly
Fish: pair of gold nugget clowns, a couple wrasses
Inverts: 2 cleaners and a fire


Using saliferts tests kits. Mag and calcium have been high since beginning. Calcium is now at 500, mag is 1600.

What can I do to lower these two and can it hurt the beauties in here? Thanks in advance.

 

[FL_Reefer]

Not for nothing but are you sure you are mixing the ESV correctly? I know a lot of people use ESV and get great results and I used it for about 6 months but it seamed every time I tested new saltwater it was never the same. Are you dosing anything? How often are you doing water changes and have you tested your new batch of salt water? I would start there.

 

[tristanfish]

Not for nothing but are you sure you are mixing the ESV correctly? I know a lot of people use ESV and get great results and I used it for about 6 months but it seamed every time I tested new saltwater it was never the same. Are you dosing anything? How often are you doing water changes and have you tested your new batch of salt water? I would start there.

Great questions-

1) I'm def not 100% sure if I'm mixing correctly. What I do know is that I am following the instructions correctly
2) water change is 2x a week- 10% each
3) I've tested the water before using the water only for alk, Salinity. But I've only started using ESV for the last couple of water changes. Otherwise I've been using nutri-sea

 

[FL_Reefer]

When I was using ESV I felt the same about mixing, even after triple checking my measurments, lol. I would test your next batch and see what you come up with. I was going to suggest using water changes to bring down those levels but if this is where your problem is than its not really solving anything Ya know. But to me on the surface, that is probably where the problem is coming from. Or your salinity is to high. How are you checking it?

 

[tristanfish]

When I was using ESV I felt the same about mixing, even after triple checking my measurments, lol. I would test your next batch and see what you come up with. I was going to suggest using water changes to bring down those levels but if this is where your problem is than its not really solving anything Ya know. But to me on the surface, that is probably where the problem is coming from. Or your salinity is to high. How are you checking it?

What salt are you using?

 

[FL_Reefer]

I switched back to Red Sea regular

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

500 ppm calcium is not high enough to worry about, and the 1600 ppm magnesium may be a testing error, if not a salt mix error.

That said, there's no other source for these in your tank than the salt mixes (assuming you are not dosing them).

Higher than expected salinity will also push these up.

Since you used it, perhaps it is the Nutri Seawater that was the problem. It is impossible to understand what they really mean from their web site, but there's no chance you could keep anything reasonable alive in it if it really was what it claims:

http://www.nutriseawater.com

FWIW, it claims the magnesium concentration is over 2,000 ppm, and overall seems to be way, way too high in salinity, then they make the ludicrous claim that it has a specific gravity of 1.027, which is just utter nonsense since anyone can add up the ingredients and see the salinity is nearly 50 ppt even without the third most abundant ion even mentioned (sulfate).

Hopefully their web site is just full of crap and the actual product is totally different.

 

[FL_Reefer]

Well said Randy, I was not familiar with that type of salt/seawater and it levels. That is definitely the issue here if that is true, wouldn't you agree? I would start doing some water changes. What would you do?