I'm using red sea coral pro but i'd like to try something else to see if there's any improvement. How should I go about transitioning to a new brand? Can I make a total switch right away or gradually?
Gradually. If you’re doing 10% - 20% water changes weekly, that should help drop it alongside your corals regular consumption of elements
When the end of your awc line starts to clog what happens then as I’m sure you already know but have decided is ok for you but then you pump in less clean fresh mixed saltwater then you pull out. With this happening what you will get is saltwater being removed but not added back in then your ato will dump fresh water in lowering your salinity. I’m not sure how you can think this is not a problem. When we set up auto water changes we calibrate pump heads to remove and add the same amount of water to prevent this and you literally use a salt that screws this up. There is no way for you to tell if your fresh salt water line is 10% 20% 30% clogged but either way if it is that is 10-30% less saltwater going back in. Over couple weeks that can drift salinity. Anyways to each his own. But I would prefer to stay away from this problem. And this has happened to me did not catch it till supply line was completely clogged and salinity dropped to 1.023 from 1.026. Since then switched to tmp and I make sure the supply line is under the water line in my sump. Reefing is hard enough as it it already
I will openly admit that it is far from ideal. My apex monitors salinity and I still frequently check salinity with my refractometers or conductivity meter, so if my new water line plugs significantly I should catch it before it becomes an issue. What I've started to do recently is I just clean the end of the line in my mixing station each time I mix up a batch. It only takes me a minute to clean and it doesn't seem to plug noticeably in the 2 weeks it takes before I mix another batch. It's an insignificant amount of work to make it to where I can keep buying the cheap salt.
If it is plugging the line at the tip better believe inside the lines and doser head is also caked
I replace the doser line enough that it doesn't matter as for the rest of the line I'm sure it does to some extent. Because of that I periodically re-calibrate everything. Ultimately if the line gets too bad my intentions are to replace the entire line. Which the line runs through the ceiling but I can use the old line as a "pull-string" for the new one. Plus I'm at around 1.5 years of using the same line and so far the only significant blockage has been at the end of the line. So even if replacing the line becomes necessary it won't be a common maintenance task.
haha. However, if we are picking fly poop out of a box of pepper, which it seems we are, then you are right lol.
