Rate of Salt addition.....

cohazard

cohazard

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Apr 6, 2004
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I'm treating a tank for ich, and I was wondering.....I know I add 1/4 tsp per gallon every hour, but how fast do I add that mix?

Dave's article says he siphons it into the tank with airline tubing, but I can't get the salt mix up high enough to siphon the salt mix into the tank.

So what I've been doing is adding it cup by cup at a steady pace.....is that too fast? Would it be too fast to just dump in the water?


thanks in advance for your help......BTW, I did do a search but I couldn't find the answer to my questions.
 
try adding a table spoon per 10 gallons of water. you want to use aquarium salt, not marine salt. You can add each table spoon in every hour untill you have reached your proper salinity.
 
Essentially, any method you use to mix the salt with water and then add it to the tank in a high flow area is fine. Just make sure the salt is dissolved as mentioned before it goes in the tank. The small dosage each hour will prevent any concern of rapidly changing the tank and hurting you fish. So how fast you actually dump the mix won't matter, you are still dealing with a 1/4 teaspoon per gallon total at each dosage. If there happens to be a momentaary high concentration area, the fish will just swim away from it.
Dave
 
spartan said:
When i dealt with ick i mixed about 20-30 teaspoons of salt into a bucket and just poured it into the tank. I did this every couple of hours until i hit about 110 teaspoons (it was a 55g)

Daves airline method is probably much less stressful.
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This is what I did also. Dissolve it into water, then pour a small quantity at regular intervals.

I was at a pet store this weekend, they had a cup of fresh salt (literally, 1 cup) sitting at the bottom of a 10 gallon tank. ....this couldn't be a good way to add salt!
 
I took about 24 hrs to add all the salt to mine when I had it in the 55 gallon. Maybe I'm a weenie. :rolleyes:
 
Can someone PLEASE tell me why you can't add the salt directly to your tank? Does adding the salt in solid form somehow make it affect osmoregulation any differently? That is why salt kills fish if added too fast right? The fish's own "anti-diffusion/anti-osmosis" mechanisms (chloride cells etc) cannot change fast enough to keep up with the ion gradient and exchange between it's environment and it's blood.
Before the salt mixes with the water, it has to dissolve. While it's dissolving, there may be a small area of higher concentration, but as Dave said, fish can just swim away. If you're only adding 1/4 tsp per gallon, I highly doubt an area would develope that would harm the fish.
Well, for what it's worth, I just dump it in.
 
Well, for what it's worth, I just dump it in.
Click to expand...

MY fish try to eat everything I dump in the tank, I'm not extremely comfortable with this. additionally, salt can and will rest on the bottom and not disolve if it happens to land in a pile or an area of low flow.
Discretion seems the better part when adding it, so I personally always reccomend mixing first.
My airline siphon method is the lazy way out, because I can sit it on top of the hood and walk away if I want to.
dave
 
Thanks for the replies everyone. What I ended up doing was exactly how I was doing it (logic goes a long way, lol).

I just mixed the salt in a 5g bucket and added it cup by cup.

It's a 29g tank, so I used appx 7.25 tsp. of salt for each batch of salt mix I made. Just two more batches and I'll be up to 2 tsp./gallon.

I hope I caught it early enough, because the dempsey's barely started rubbing against the decor today.

Oh, I also raised the temp to about 87F.



secretmuscles said:
try adding a table spoon per 10 gallons of water. you want to use aquarium salt, not marine salt. You can add each table spoon in every hour untill you have reached your proper salinity.
Click to expand...

Actually, there's a much faster way of doing it. Read this article, and you'll understand why I'm doing it the way I'm doing it. It was written by Dave (Davedka) and it's truly been a life saver.


Thanks again
 
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