Salt Question

[KorD]

You are measuring 30 minutes after mixing, but you mention a heater in the bucket. If I am interpreting the chart found here correctly, specific gravity of water will decrease as temperature increases. I'd bump to three measurements: one when mixed, one the next day after temperature hits the heater set point, and another day or two after that to see if the temperature change is the issue.

Nice chart. I have not seen that before,
I keep my water in my garage. I'm in Texas, so my heater does not really have to work that hard to bring the DI water up to temp.. my garage stays about 75°f right now and it's not even summer time.

And if I read the chart correctly.. I should not see this big of a SG swing.

 

[sfin52]

if you are constantly adding bunch of water from your ato and salinity is falling its got to be a small leak. If it was through evaporation than the salinity would be high and ato is not working.
What size system are you running?
How much water is your ato adding to the tank?
Are you by chance running an air stone in the tank?

 

[KorD]

if you are constantly adding bunch of water from your ato and salinity is falling its got to be a small leak. If it was through evaporation than the salinity would be high and ato is not working.
What size system are you running?
How much water is your ato adding to the tank?
Are you by chance running an air stone in the tank?

My ATO is only adding a little at a time. About 1/2 gal every couple days. I have a 29 gal tank with a 7 gal sump. Skimmer is dry skimming.
No air stone, skimmer does the work with nano bubbles in the sump.

For the last few days my ATO has been topping off with a 1.025 SG salt mix so I can bring the SG back up to where I want it.

 

[Crustaceon]

Wet skimming can remove salt as can salt creep.

 

[KorD]

Wet skimming can remove salt as can salt creep.

I dry skin only, and that would be a lot of salt creep.. I'm not seeing any signs to bring the SG as low as it has gotten.

I'm still waiting to hear back from IO about the batch and what they have to say.

 

[KorD]

Ok.. outcome is they think the calcium precipitated and is dropping to the bottom of the bucket which intern will leave the SG gradually getting lower over the next few hours. I made up two batches of salt yesterday, one brand new mixture and one from the old batch. I took SG readings from both. For 2 gallons of water it was one cup tightly packed new salt to get me 1.035 SG. And for 2 gallons overwater it took almost 2 and 1/2 cups to get me 1.35 SG with the old salt. After about 3 hours the SG dropped to 1.20 with the old salt but stay the same with the new salt. Now instant ocean basically told me that they have no answer for what's happening really and just to mix it a higher batch for the old salt instead of the new salt.

What I found very interesting was the old salt only had 6.2 dkh of alkalinity and also showed .50 phosphates when it was 1.035 SG