Old bucket of salt.

I have a 5 year old bucket of reef crystals with alk tested about 2dkh and calcium 220. I think I'm just going to toss this bucket/give it away.
Anyone ever test an old bucket? Not sure how the Calcium could just disappear. Just a bad batch of salt?
Test kits new Elos for alk,mag and API for Calcium.
Everything was very low for a bucket of instant ocean I used that was 5 years old as well. I manually brought up the Calcium and alk and mag. with that batch. Mag was down around 900 for the IO. I haven't tested the mag on this batch of RC.
I do have some Red Sea pro coral in the mail so will check it out as soon as it gets here to see if test kits are doing their job.

 

Good idea. Remember basic reef chemistry and what happens when you combine calcium and bicarbonate (I.e. alkalinity). Same thing that happens if you dose two-part together, or allow pH to rise too high, or add too much calcium or alk, you get calcium carbonate. In other words, your salt turned more or less to limestone

 

Ah.. didn't think of it that way thanks. Tested another bucket of old Red sea salt with similar results. DkH was 3. 5 . Didn't bother testing anything else. I guess I hauled these buckets around for several moves for nothing lol.

 

just curious, did you mix up the entire bucket in ro water or did you make a gallon or so before you tested it? because, over the years i'm sure everything would have settled out.

 

Not an entire bucket. I mixed a 44 gallon trash can from the RC and about a 1-2 gallon from the Red Sea salt. Later I did another 1-2 gallon from the RCrystals to see if it was any different down in the bucket and it was the same about a 1.5 dKH. The salt has solidified into a big mass so m2434s explanation makes sense.

 

What overall salinity did you mix it to?

And who are you calling an old salt?

 

Mixed to 1.026