Mobile Bay Reef Keepers

Since i'm on a mission to get my tank straight again, i will soon be in need of salt. The last bucket i got was of IO Reef Crystals, but i have been reading some bad things about it. I got a heck of a deal on it though and i'm looking for some suggestions or sites that have good prices.

what bad things have you read? Thats all I use and have had no problems and I thought most people were using that instead of the regular instant ocean.

Things like impurities in the salt that leave a brown ring on the mixing container, difficulty dissolving, inconsistent values in testing content, etc... I myself have not had any issues with it, but didn't want to make a purchase of something that was iffy. I am looking at petsmart online and see that they have 150gal. buckets of coralife for $45 on-line. They are supposed to match that price in store... assuming they have it. Shipping is always the killer on salt and sand.

I went back to read about the issues and it looks like they occurred a few years back and are probably now resolved. Apparently IO went bankrupt and were bought out? Still reading, but maybe this is all old news.

Dr.F&S has flat $9 shipping... Where do you buy yours?

A lot of salts can do that, especially if they've gotten a bit moist, etc. Most of the brown is calcium carbonate with a few impurities (probably iron or maybe some of the vitamin additives), which simply precipitates out of solution (which is also why you see a small decrease in calcium and alkalinity a little while after mixing). Heating the water makes this worse. The only one(s) I know of that could largely avoid that would be ESV's new salt, which adds calcium and carbonate separately, instead of together, giving you much better solubility. That's not to say that IO and RC don't work, because that is what I use--I'll often alternate, depending upon how lazy I am. As far as parameters, most of them are easily tweaked. Higher alkalinity is common in both IO and RC, but that is usually beneficial in a number of ways, assuming you aren't dosing a form of organic carbon.