Dosing Mg

Does anyone see anything wrong with dosing epsom salts for Mg? I know that the sulfates can build up over time, but with 10% weekly water changes that should eliminate that problem right? Thanks for your comments and suggestion!

Brs sells it pretty cheap

BRS does sell it pretty cheap... i found some ice melt the other day that says 100% mag chloride hexahydrate.... from everything i can tell it is 100% the hexahydrate is just how the salt crystal forms with 6 H20 ions (at least thats what i got from the read).. i am ordering some from brs tomorrow and going to do a side by side test to see if they are at all different... if they are looks like i have my ice melt for next year lol

Do you just mix their magnesium chloride and magnesium sulfate? Or can I just mix the epsom salts with the magnesium chloride...

Seems like its kinda a gamble to use some random ice melt for MgCl Im not saying there isnt ones out there that work just fine without releasing crap into the water but until someone does a study and says that a particular brand is 100% reef safe. Why risk it? BRS is pretty cheap obviously not as cheap as costco. If you think about how much your spending over the course of say like a year it really doesn't cost much. These company's say 100% MgCl or for calcium 100% CaCl but in all actuality they aren't even close.

To me its worth the extra $ to have the peace of mind.

Edited by wickedsnowman - March 04 2011 at 12:10am

This is a good instructional video on mixing up Magnesium. You can use Magnesium Sulfate or Magnesium chloride form what ever source you want. I get mine form BRS as well and it lasts a long time. I bought mine as part of the 2 part starter kit a year ago and still have about 1/2 of the product left so over time the cost is minimal but you can save money if you want to use Ice Melt or other products. It's best to mix the Mag Sulfate and Chloride and this video covers the proper amounts to mix up one gallon of Magnesium solution.

I did a mix of the BRS MgCl with Epsom Salt as I couldn't find the MgCl cheap alternatives.  Of course, the recipe calls for 5 cups of the more expensive MgCl to the 3 Cups of Epsom Salt in 1 gallon of water.   That said the Mg dosing is less often and less expensive than the Calc or Alk dosing.

The OP has been answered very well.

As for the Bryopsis problem:
The reason PO4 and N compounds are at or near zero is because the algae is eating it as fast as it enters the water.
Algae is such a wonderful water purifier.

Tech M must be added until the Mg level is over 2000 ppm to start killing Bryopsis.

The extra feeding is actually just feeding the Bryopsis you are trying to get rid of. I would definitely recommend stopping the feeding for 4 days and feeding half as much after that. Trust me, everything will be fine without feeding, in fact it will be better, as the rest of the  biofiltration catches up to the overfeeding, in effect 'eats up the food'. When a tank is not fed so much the fish and inverts start eating more algae. Algae is a major part of most fish and invert menus. A healthy reef tank actually feeds itself by growing some of it's own food, but that's hard to discover until we cut off and then slow the feeding from then on.

How many of what type of snails are in this 40 gal tank?


Edited by Mark Peterson - May 02 2011 at 9:28am