Corals don't look right.

I'm with you on that one. A established system with lots of corals will use up the cal mag and alk just about as fast as you can put it in. But bin a system with very few corals there isn't much use of the 3 so we end up overloading our systems and end up doing more harm than help. Like I said before is all personal preference. Whatever works best for your specific setup is what you should use.

 

I'm more confused than ever now. Lol. My hydrometer reads 1.024. My friends refractometer reads 1.028 and the refractometer I got today reads the same water at 1.022. Three different readings with three different devices.

 

You probably just need to calibrate both refractometers.

 

Either calibrate them with fresh water or use the calibration fluid that comes with some refractometers.

 

I calibrated mine per the instructions. But it said it has to be 68 degrees in the room you use to calibrate. It wasn't that cool. But the line was dead on 0 with distilled water.

 

Did you calibrate the other?

 

The other was a friend of mine. I'm assuming his was calibrated correctly. I'm gonna mess with it some more when I get home.

 

I am having the same issue. When I setup the new tank, I was planning on having corals, so i have been using reef crystals. My calcium is also high. do you think I could do a 50/50 of reef crystals and regular salt? I have another bag and a half of reef crystals.

 

After my experience I'd just use basic salt until you have a lot of SPS and LPS. I'm by no means and expert with salt water so I'm sure others will chime in. I have a frogspawn, GSP, four small colonies of ZOAs with about 35 plus polyps and several small frags of ZOAS and the Red Sea Coral pro was way more than I needed. My parameters were sky high.

 

I'm using a 150W MH at the moment. I have a 120w Evergrow LED fixture that's supposed to be in tomorrow.