I haven’t yet had a chance to mail in a sample of my water to AWT (aquariumwatertesting.com), but will be doing so shortly. However, of interest to anyone keeping a reef, AWT recently tested a whole slew of different salt brands, and their results can be found here. Very interesting, I’m now really looking forward to getting mine done, as it seems Reef Crystals is indeed inherently low in a couple parameters that I suspected…
And on another note to anyone keeping reefs, here’s a short video clip by Glassbox Design… a couple quick tips on making your tank look sharp… get those frag racks out of the main display!
Elos E-lite LED 
Ecotech Vortech MP20 
Elos Skimmer 
Eheim Return 
GFO Reactor 
Heater 1 
Heater 2 
Litermeter III 
Email Alarm 
admin
2 years ago
after reading the the results of their salt analysis, i really don’t know what the hell to think… rather than mixing to a standard salinity, they took a certain weight (see page 4, 7 grams to 200mL water) and mixed it up… most reef keepers I know keep tanks 33 – 35 ppt, why not choose a salinity, be it 33 or 36, whatever, and mix each salt up to that. It almost seems lazy to me… but if they took the time to test all the parameters, it certainly couldn’t have taken much longer to measure out how much salt mix is needed per, say, 5 gallons, to reach “X” ppt. I don’t really understand the reasoning behind it… who mixes only 7 grams at a time? drug dealers? Why not make a full gallon of water? Who makes less than a gallon, seriously? 200 mL?
I certainly applaud AWT’s efforts on making this kind of study available, but I don’t get the reasoning behind testing the salts at different salinities.
Look at the older Inland Reef Aquaria salt studies – here is what they did, and I think this is the proper way to have gone about it:
jeffry r. johnston
2 years ago
Good post, Stony!
Chehaliscoral
2 years ago
Dang, they didnt do a study on OceanPure. Maybe on the next one
Switching to Tunze Reef Excel Lab Grade Salt | stonyreef
3 months ago
[...] of reef salts out there, it can be a pretty confusing choice. The aquarium salt test results from AWT, Inland Reef Aquaria, and the various salt parameters and opinions seen posted on the reef boards [...]