how to introduce salt to my tank..

[lussieraston]

75 gallon fish and live rock only tank. am ready to put the salt in. i will most likely use instant ocean. how much do i use, how do i put it in... give me your opinions and the do's or dont's of doing this.

[Matt Rogers]

First thing, you need a hydrometer. This will measure the salt in your water.

Any fish store will sell the plastic swing arm type for cheap.

If you are willing to spend around $50, you can get a more accurate one called a refractometer.

You can find examples of both here.

After that, go to some place like home depot and pick up a big rubbermaid type trashcan that holds like 30 gallons.

Roll that up near your tank and put water in it.
Then mix salt with something like the plastic handle on a algae scrapper. Each bag of salt will say how many gallons of saltwater it will make. So mix enough to get you around the same as the water in your trashcan.

After mixing well, use your hydrometer to get you near 1.024 - 1.026.

If you want to be really good, put a heater in the trashcan and a powerhead or air stone and let sit overnight or so.

Or you can mix in a small bucket, but it will take a lot of buckets to get to 75 gallons.

Or you could mix in the tank if nothing else is in it and add the sand and rock after the salt water is well mixed, but adding the sand and rock later can be very messy.

If you are using dry sand, I would suggest rinsing it in a bucket first to remove debris.

Hope that helps! Thanks for joining!



Matt

[lussieraston]

is there any way to add salt to my tank after the sand and water is already in? or am i going to have to empty my tank once again and start all over?

[Matt Rogers]

People have done it. I imagine it is messy and takes a while to mix through the sand.

Personally I would still get one of those cans I was talking about and drain it into that until you get to the sand. Mix it in there then use a pump to get it back to the tank.

[dolphinfan]

ok..
first this is another great site for understanding swft.can some one stear me in the right direction?heres what i have 55 gal rectangler tank.hob peng 400 filter.good lighting 2 power heads.can i mix 20 lbs live sand with the rest southtown play sand?i have no place to buy salt water pre made so what can i do?i want to add about 35lbs lv.any suggestions would help

[tresguey]

my brother called me up with that same problem. what i did was take five gallon bucket and remove about four gallons of water from the tank into the bucket. then we added the salt to the bucket. about what we thought the tank would hold. mixed it as best as possible and let it settle a bit then added it to the tank up untill the undisolved salt was about to pour in then i stopped. then again added water from the tank to the bucket. we had to do this about five times before all the salt disolved. but it was better than adding the salt straight to the tank.

[hoodoo]

well, I added my salt after the aragonite was in. It took me really long though. I have a 20 gallon sump and I added the very high salty water there. Always very little so that the salt would not settle down in the sand. Took me a few hours because I did it real slow.