Ahh another excuse to profess my love of ESV B-Ionic.....j/k.....kinda
Sure it dissolves completely and is all super high grade yada yada but here's the main things that sold me
1. I have a nano full of LPS so keeping params stable was a constant game of balance and catch up with dosing. Each waterchange meant muddling up the dosing I did the week before and figuring out what the new water did to my readings and how to adjust it to ideal and trying to balance it with what the coral are going to use up. To confuse things more, different batches of the same salt were almost never the same as the one before. My corals grew but never thrived like they do in constant stable conditions, and it was a lot of work. Now I control salinity, magnesium, alkalinity, and calcium independantly and adjusted them to slightly above optimum to account for coral usage right after trying it. I've used that proportion since and have had stable parameters so long my corals must think they're back in the ocean in the perfect spot. I've gone through multiple boxes and each has always been identical when measured out with a digital scale.
2. My tank has had every algae problem imaginable. Once I killed off the turf algae, the Asparagopsis thrived. Once it got controlled the Calurpa went into hyperdrive. Get it tamed and bubble algae does nuts. Over and over the cycles went. I was doing 50% water changes every week, running a skimmer and using distilled water...where are these excess nutrients coming from???? I switched to ESV and these headaches magically disappeared. Suddenly the Calurpa barely grows instead of growing an inch a day and I can see bare rock again. Well over a year later and no plagues or nuisances since. I guess reagent grade means something afterall.
3. The coral. Using other salts meant PO'd corals on waterchange day. I'm giving them fresh clean water and they look like the day they arrived in the mail during a winter shipment. Or even worse if a problem arose and I had to use emergency mixed water and the corals got "snowed" on by calcium or whatever precipitated out of the water during mixing. My first water change with ESV sold me. I mixed it for about 10 minutes and noticed the temperature was within 2 degrees of the tank temperature so I drained out half the tank and filled it with the new ESV. To my astonishment the corals didn't shrink up or try to turn inside out....but looked the same. Within minutes they're all puffed up and for lack of better words "look happy". I've changed out 95% of the tank water before and when filled up with the same temperature ESV the results are the same. I actually feel like I'm doing something good for them instead of trying to convince them it was for their own good.
The downside is definitely the price. If I had a 100g reef I'd dread using it. On a small tank like mine the 200g box lasts over half the year and compared to the price of test kits having to be overused, dosing, and all the other things it balanced out for me pretty quickly. I just wish I started out with ESV instead of putting my tank through all those crazy water swings the first few years. Hopefully I can save someone else those headaches.
) salts... Sea Chem, way back when it came in a small black bucket, and had crap tons of Borate in it. Tropic Marin Bio Assay, after the Dr Ron reviews, which resulted in great losses for me, and then Instant Ocean, which I have used for the longest. I did buy a bag of RC once, tested it up and found it so close to IO that it wasn't worth the extra cash to me. (It helps that I had a HUGE Ca reactor and Kalk reactors running.)
