Oceanic Salt

Whats is the source of that odor MDP? Is it "off" ingredients, poor source of ingredients, poor mix or what? Plus, what is that foul brown/iron stain/residue that IO leaves behind? BTW Mike, why not join, and identify yourself? Your knowledge of salt would be very helpful to this forum.

Fletch, what other brands have you tried prior to using Oceanics?

 

Gresham,
           I am in no way an expert on salt mixes but as I said I am pleased with Oceanic sea mix, I have used  Instant Ocean, Red Sea And Crystal Sea (formerly known as Forty Fathoms), It was Forty Fathoms when I used it in the past ...............John

 

We don't get much Forty Fathoms around here, did it mix slow or cloudy?

 

That was some time ago Gresham I would say somewhere around 8 years ago, as I stated it was when it was still Forty Fathoms I do believe it is now Crystal Sea. I memory serves me it did both mixed slowly and was cloudy ... John

 

Instant Ocean seems to be everywhere so it was the salt mix I used the most. IMO I think that Oceanic far better than Instant Ocean ...................... John

 

I have been using Kent and IO for years with good success. We will be getting in Tropin Marin soon now and I want to slowly change over to that give that a try for a while and see how things go.

 

I'll stick with IO and Coralife. I've never had a bad experience with either and if you read my posting on Oceanic you may wind up changing your minds.
I had a very serious 'batch' problem that led to an almost complete wipe out of my reef tank using only a 10% water change.
I'm having a friend of mine do his own testing on this batch to see if he comes up with similar results.
The two bad things were pH after mixing was 6.8 - 7.0 and the salinity at first would not even register at all. After raising the temp of the mix to 84 F it suddenly jumped up to 1.015. Still well below where it should be.
My experience with it has been horrible to say the least. I kept some just in case anyone wanted to test it out themselves. So far I have had little to no luck in getting any kind of response from Oceanic Systems other than for them to suggest it was a water 'source' problem.
Pretty good deduction considering they have absolutely nothing to go by.
I've sent them my test results and will coaberate them with another set of test results. My next step is the local University who has both a Marine Sciences and Chemistry lab.
If your using a salt thats working for you now, don't break what's already fixed.

 

Update, my system evetually was a total collapse after 1 week. Even after doing extensive water changes I could not reverse the effects from the Oceanic Brand Salt.
I informed Oceanic Systems as well as provided documentation and test results to them which they ignored.
Only after I informed them I would be posting my results publicly (which I did) did they bother to contact me. This was a day by day account with testing data.
If you look here on 3rref.com under "Oceanic is making salt now" I have posted where you can find the results as well as comments from other customers of Oceanic.
As I said most were positive to start but the longer the threads went it became apparent that Oceanic did have a serious problem that they have only recently admitted.
The problem is that there is no way to know which bags or buckets of Oceanic are the tainted ones. They do not lot or batch number there bags or buckets which leaves us the hobbyists to "chance".

I have since been conacted by Oceanic who were very clearly not happy I posted my results as well as others test results to the public. I am now in the process of getting all the documentation together in a chronological order to present to them for what it's worth.

Had they responded in a reasonably timely manner I may not have posted the results publicly but as a longtime satwater hobbyist I've seen what leaving things to "chance" can do to your system. Since Oceanic does not want to account for there products safety I felt it necessary to inform others in hopes that you will not have to experience the same problem.

Please take some time and at least read over some of the postings and draw your own conclusions as to the safety of Oeanic Salt. As I said this is a "batch" problem and to the best of my knowledge only 1 batch but I'm not even sure of that. Each batch is 2500 lbs and so far I've found "bad" batches in at least 6 different U.S. states from other users.
Read the postings and decide for yourself.