What's your Magesium Supplement?

[aka_bigred]

Ok, in this installment of the "What's your..." poll series, I'm trying to find out what people use to supplement their Magnesium levels.

[Jflip2002]

I dont touch it lol.

[mtfatwork]

I use tech m on the tanks, except for the frag tank with the calcium reactor, that one I use Zeo-mag in the reactor.

[Sea monkey]

I don't think the average reefer really understands how important a role magnesium plays in maintaining calcium and and alkalinity. without magnesium, dosing the other two can be waste of time and money because it all precipitates out. without maintaining the proper magnesium levels you will never have the proper calcium and alkalinity levels , no matter how much you dump in.

I use mag flake (magnesium chloride) because it is cheap . Many of the products above are either magnesium chloride or a mix of magnesium chloride and magnesium sulfate (Epsom salts) either dry or mixed with water. They just have a fancy label and cost 50 times a much.

When I first started this hobby I had the delusion that all these large companies were manufacturing all these chemicals themselves and they were all optimized for aquarium use or “aquarium grade”

Turns out this couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s simply not cost effective to produce your own calcium chloride, magnesium chloride , calcium hydroxide, sodium bicarbonate, sodium carbonate , magnesium sulfate , activated carbon … when there are other companies already out there that produce a few million pounds a day of these products and you can purchase them for pennies a pound.

Many of these “aquarium grade” chemicals are in fact really poor choices for the applications we are using them for . A prime example is the pelleted activated carbon that is so popular. These pellets are not even made for filtering water, it is for filtering vapor/gases and performs really poorly in water. I can only guess that they found that the average reefer/consumer preferred pellets so that’s what they sell rather than trying to inform them. Some of the products use shortcuts because it’s cheaper or easier, many of the products defy all known water chemistry and have no little to no possibility of doing what they say .

[jeffie]

magflake

[David Grigor]

I voted for mag sulfate and mag chloride since those are the two incredients to the DIY recipes. It slightly differs the proportions depending on if you use 2 part or if you don't.

Commercial ones the Kent and ESV both get high marks but I've never used ( and never will with DIY versions now availalbe ).

Seachem is not as good becuase it also contains elevated levels of borate for buffering.

[DLO]

I voted mag flake . I have been using about a half a pound a week of epsom salt but I just got a bucket of the mag flake from two part solution today .

[Loverotties]

I don't add it.just do a WC every week to keep it up and stable.

[Hendersonracing]

seems I have to add it to keep it at 1350 If not it drops to around 1050

[Hop]

I used to use mag flake and epsom salts, but I've been using seachem reef salt as of late and it seems to test out at 420 CA, 9.0 alk and 1300 mag... So I have not touched it since I set up the new tank.


Edit: Sorry I missed that this was a club forum... I try so hard not to post in the clubs...