Supplement dosing, converting percentage to parts per

Suohhen · May 20, 2021

Is their a method to convert percentage values to ppm? For instance Kent Iron says it is .24% iron. Also does anyone know if the is the value of iron or is it the iron EDTA?

65Naja · May 20, 2021

Yes the conversion is rather simple
10000 ppm is 1% as follows 9000 ppm = .9% and 2400 ppm = .24%

Randy Holmes-Farley · May 20, 2021

Also, it would be the iron value, not anything bound to it.

What value do you plan to target? Some companies (such as Red Sea) seem to have unnecessarily high target levels, which may just be to allow one to use their test kit . 1 ug/L is plenty.

Suohhen · May 20, 2021

Randy Holmes-Farley said:
Also, it would be the iron value, not anything bound to it.

What value do you plan to target? Some companies (such as Red Sea) seem to have unnecessarily high target levels, which may just be to allow one to use their test kit . 1 ug/L is plenty.

I dose Kent Iron because I have a refugium. I don't test for anything in the supplement but I do yearly icp tests. I am just curious how to do the math especially because the values vary greatly between supplements as you stated. I'd like to have an idea of what seems high or low. So the math is basically 12ml/120gal * 2400 = .063ppm?

Suohhen · May 21, 2021

Can anyone verify if this math is correct. 12ml of a solution of .24% Iron will increase iron by .063ppm.

Suohhen · Jan 29, 2022

Ok so I just did an ATI icp test and it came back at 10.42 ppb, if my calculations above are correct then I am dosing ~9 ppb a day which means the dose is stable. But the ocean's level is more like .006ppb, However like most trace elements I am hard pressed to find hard evidence of safe levels. So I guess my question would be whether there have been any new developments or things I may be missing, and I have a plan to start dripping this in with a doser which would distribute the dose throughout the day, so even if there isn't firm evidence I'd like to know if anyone is of the firm belief that trying to keep levels lower is the way to go.
The last two ICP tests were May '21 and June '19 through ICP Analysis and the levels were 3ppb and 1ppb respectively. This was before I was dosing Kent Iron, I started after that '21 test.

Randy Holmes-Farley · Jan 30, 2022

Red Sea still recommends 100 ppb, and I still recommend dosing a lower amount, but which is better has never been ascertained.

Randy Holmes-Farley · Jan 30, 2022

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Iron (Fe). The natural iron level varies a lot with depth, but surface seawater may have only 0.006 µg/L. The Triton LOD = 0.3 µg/L. I dose iron, and when I dose it I boost iron to roughly 1-2 µg/L, which would be detectable. This sample was taken more than a week after the last iron dosing, and none was detected as it gets depleted in the meanwhile. I’ve not yet seen a Triton test result for a real aquarium sample that had detectable iron, but that doesn’t mean these tanks are necessarily deficient. Iron is also a case where the form is critical, and ICP cannot distinguish form. Binding to organic matter, for example, can alter the bioavailability of iron.

Suohhen · Jan 31, 2022

Thank you for the insight! I've seen that you say the red sea test is the reason for that, makes sense. I read that article and pretty much anything else I could find about icp which was mostly r2r posts back when I decided to start dosing. But it was an article you sited somewhere which looked at the metal content in coral skeletons which was very compelling. The way I saw it the wild and waikiki aquarium corals were getting a lot of their metals from the food the ingested. Although they said there were potential contamination issues and ofc your the chemist so I'd be interested to know your opinion and whether there have been any other attempts at this type of test. Also you have an article analyzing the metal content in common aquarium foods. Those two articles really made me far less concerned with dosing.
So for the last couple years I have been dosing Kent Iron, Reef Plus, Acropower, on top of running a CaRx with ARM. Some of the elements overlap on Kent Iron and Reef Plus and yet still many of those elements are below their LOD and the few that are elevated are right around a daily dose.