Terrible Advice Tuesdays: Your Salt Mix’s Little Helper
Terrible Advice Tuesdays: RODI water won’t hold elements. Therefore, you need to use supplements to make your salt dissolve in RODI water.
The rest of the story: RODI water is “clean water” as most of the compounds and other junk in it have been removed. When you add an easily-dissolving solid (salt) to clean water, the dissolving party is ON! Forget adding supplements to your RODI water to make your salt dissolve. Just add a powerhead to circulate the water and your salt will dissolve just fine.
Browse the Store! Questions?
All the Salt mixes I read have what you need to make new saltwater and will dissolve okay unless the water is frozen.
I would have thought everyone would circulate the RODI water and the newly added salt , and using the 2 receptors in the sides of your forehead would tell you that the salt in diminishing and if you can’t realize that the salt it dissolving then you’d probably should employ a maintenance reef keeper because everything else from here on gets more technical.
Can’t believe that anyone would think this advice to be true, still a newby will fall for some silly stuff without experience and seemingly common sense.
It’s just a marketing scam to sell unmeasurable elements to someone wanting to do the best for their tank.
It is my understanding that salt should be added to the RODI water in small amounts over some time period. Never add water to dry salt as the concentration differences allows for immediate precipitation of crystals which cloud the water and are hardened and resistant to dissolution; no matter how much agitation is afforded by the powerhead.
The level of some pals ignorance is amazing!!!
A heater, and power head works for me, I make mine in 5 gallon buckets. Even if your salt mix dissolves quickly, it is better to allow 24hr or more for all of the salts elements to mix thoroughly in your R/O water source.
Why is this even a thing? There’s no way you should be a tank owner if you fall for this absurdity.
Given, James’s point is a reasonable mistake.
Love the information and advice shared here by Mark. We were all newbies at one time and all have made mistakes in this hobby. Saying someone is less than intelligent because they heeded poor advice is not helpful to someone new to this hobby. It also just makes that person sound insecure themselves. Sorry. Just had to say that.
What do you suggest I do with salt that has absorbed air moisture and is hard. Should I still use it or thrown it out
Jim Raffan October 21, 2014 at 10:58 am
What do you suggest I do with salt that has absorbed air moisture and is hard. Should I still use it or thrown it out
Jim, I suggest you break it up into little pieces, and use it to coat the edge of your margarita glass!
That’s a great idea why didn’t I think of that I could also use it when I’m cooking Dungeness crab. This websites awesome.
Red sea say dont mix their salt for more than 4 hours ,I dont recommend this as when I did this and then did a waterchange my clowns started getting covred in white slime ,when I went back to mixing for 24 hours as I hve done for 30 years everything was fine
i mix Red Sea Coral salt exactly as the instructions say to and its fine. one thing i see people make the mistake of is heating the water before adding the salt. it clearly states to mix the salt without heating first and once the salt has dissolved then add heater. never had a problem
I have a feeling this is more confusion than bad advice – from what I’ve learned over the years, only saltwater tanks regularly use RODI water. So if someone is coming from freshwater or is new and reading in many different forums, they would see that RODI water in freshwater/betta/amphibian tanks needs to have supplements added. Since RODI is clean water with everything removed, supplements are needed to add back in the minerals, etc. for use in any freshwater animal tank. For saltwater, when we add our salt mix we add back in the minerals.
So it’s not so much bad advice as simply not realizing the water specifics in tank use.