red sea marine salt

i've bought a pack of red sea marine salt today, and was wondering how much salt i should had a create a brackish environment for my guppies. does 1 teaspoon to 1 gallon sounds fine? i have no hydrometer so i cannot measure the specific gravity.

thanks.

would guppies be fine with 1 teaspoon to 1 litre? what SG does that roughly translates to?

also, this is how i do my water changes: i add water to a small container, add dechlorinator and salt, and mix with air pump. the next day, i vacuum the gravel, draining around 3 gallons to a bucket. then i attach a hose from the faucet to my tank, add dechlorinator to tank (in excess), add water from the faucet, and at the same time, add the salt water from the previous day. it's sorta like using python gravel vacum, just the draining and adding of water is done by two different equipment. the tank is 20 gallon, and i change water 2 times a week (on sat and sun).

is this water changing procedure fine?

i have been using a brand of marine sea salt, but the store had stopped stocking it, so i have to switch to another brand of marine salt. for the previous salt, i added 1 teaspoon to 1 gallon to keep tailrot away, which worked well. i suppose the 'concentration' of the previous salt is different from red sea salt, as after 2 water changes with red sea salt, my guppies immediately showed signs of tailrot. so i suppose my SG had been lowered by the red sea salt, as whenever i tried to lower the SG of the tank, tailrot showed up immediately. i've tried almost EVERYTHING to eradicate tailrot, including seachem paraguard, the green medication (can't remember the chemical name), salt dips. the only things i have not tried is snipping off the infected part of the tail or applying potassium permanganate/hydrogen peroxide on the infected parts, which is not practical for small fishes(< 1 inch). someone suggested that this may be a genetic disorder, and that there is no way to completely eradicate it, so i'm using salt to suppress it.

guppies can and will live in brackish waters. breeders have used salt with their guppies with great results. i change around 30-50% of the water each week. it's a guppies only tank. nitrates are kept below 20 ppm. the thing is, only those with flowery and big tailfin get tailrot, and are very prone to it. those with those 'plastic' and small tailfins rarely get tailrot. it is a 20 gallon with 8 small guppies.

jm1212 said:

i have had guppies in my tanks and never had tailrot- and i didnt add any salt, and they lived fine.

the point is that they are tropical fish and dont need salt of any kind. they could be getting tail rot because you have them out of freshwater and their systems are weakening.

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they are fry i have gotten from two females, and they have lived in brackish environment since birth. they have gotten used to the salt. even if the salt affected them, shouldn't all of them get tailrot? and if their health deteriorated, they showed it by developing tailrot? what about other more serious diseases?