Salt, what are my opions?

[chola1978]

Hello to all. I ma setting up my tank after moving from Phoenix, AZ to Santiago Dominican Republic. After arriving in Santiago I visited a few petshops and have no luck getting IO salt. They say they dont have a market for it. So now I find myself in a bind, My wife does not like the idea of me bringing in sea salt cuz of the smell..I need to cure LR that i harvested from the beach. What are all my salt options. IS watersoftner salt a substitu fro IO salt?

[Max]

NO don't use water softener salt it won't work. You could use ocean water if it was from a good ways off shore. I wouldn't trust it to be free of polutants much closer in than that. I'd throughly filter my water for plancton prior to introduction to the tank. Other wise there is no telling what you'll introduce.

It might be a better option to order salt on line. There really isn't much smell to it and the chances of it being full of nitrates,algae etc. are much lower than ocean salts.
Hth
Max
p.s.
Welcome to a.c.

[plah831]

I also would advise against using raw sea water. You can filter and UV sterilize it, but there are so many unknowns in the wild (biological entities, as well as pollution) that I wouldn't trust any tests or equipment to purify it enough for a closed system.

You can definitely order salt online. I just bought a 50gal bag of Instant Ocean for $9.99 on Drs. Foster and Smith. They're nice because they don't charge extra shipping for weight!

And, yes, it is truly pretty odorless :)

Welcome to Aquaria Central!

[Fishieness]

what salt options do you have there?
id say definatly order online however if you cant get what you want. here are a few different brands of salt that i ahve used and what i thought of them
-IO: i have some of that now because after a large crisis, i needed to add some water to my tank (yes, add. my skimemr overflowed) and every place was closed except petco since it was 9 o clock at night when i got home. i dont really like it. im having low dKH readings. and i cant keep a normal alk so im believeing that i have low Mg levels too but at the moment i dont have a test kit for it. Ca is also lower than it should be at around 360-380.
-before that i was using tropic marine. i loved the make up because it was really quality trace element wise. however, i was getting a lot of dinoflangulates and have heard the same experiences from others. Suposedly there are small amount of PO4 in there but i never checked to tell you the truth because i assumed there werent and i was running phosban
-IO reef crystals: i used a few bags of this and thought it was okay. until my green slimer STNed to the size of a BB in under a week. this was back before i had a PO3 test and apparently the water changes i kept doign to make it better contained .3 PO4!!!! i thought that may be the problem so i went to get a test and found this out. i didnt even finish the bag. Another thing about it that goes the same for the normal IO. It has insuluble minerals of some type in there that you notice after you dump all the water in. theres some brown crap on the bottom of the bucket
-red sea: i used this before i had a reef, and so it was before i had anything to test it with besides the basics. and since i didnt have a reef i couldnt tell you how it performed
-oceanic: i used this for a while. it wasnt bad but i was getting SUPER high Ca levels of close to around 700 which is extremely odd because i woudl have imagineed that it owuld have percipitated at that levels. the guy at one of my LFS said it can be pretty varying depending on the batch, and every once in a while youll get an off one, but for the most part it is okay.
-coralife: not bad. all the levels were right on but im not sure how great trace element and Mg levels are.

so now im just waiting to finish my bag of IO before i try ANOTHER salt....