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- Today on BRS TV Reef FAQs we answer
how do we prevent all that crud mixing up
in our salt water mixing bins.
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Hi I'm Ryan, your host at BRStv Reef FAQ's.
Today it's time to confront the crud.
All that brown crusty build up
that's been part of reefers' lives for decades,
but just doesn't have to be.
I'm pretty certain most reefers
don't enjoy cleaning salt water bins.
And once it's disturbed,
no one wants a dose of brown cloud in the tank
with what was supposed to be a water change
that cleans the tank.
We have the top three super easy ways
to prevent the build up of crud
anyone can implement.
Starting with number three,
filter it out.
All these salts come from different sources of mine.
Evaporated or purified synthetic salts
all have different levels of major elements,
and some potentially have chelators,
clays and clarifiers.
All of which can produce precipitate
and brown organic crud in the storage tank walls,
and even create a brown organic film
or foam on the surface of the water,
which is supposed to be clean water used
for a water change.
One of the easier ways to deal with this
is just filter it out,
the most common method being something like
a BRS reactor with a five micron ROSave.Z sediment filter.
I strongly suggest that specific filter,
because it's a true depth filter
with a vastly different graded density
that you can feel with your hand,
meaning it will capture contaminants
throughout its entire thickness,
and last a lot longer for this application.
In most cases, a single few dollar filter
will clean an entire bucket of salt.
Combined with good mixing methods,
this will keep your bin free of crud,
virtually eliminate the need to clean it,
and make sure none of that enters the tank.
The second method of avoiding the crust
is mix the salt properly to begin with.
In many cases, what looks like a crusty precipitate
in the storage container is a direct result
from not thoroughly mixing the salt to begin with.
That was something that we found in a BRS TV Investigates,
with mixing eight different salts for an hour
with a powerhead, and then just pulling the plug.
Six of the eight options had some pretty significant amounts
of crusty buildup over the following weeks,
with just twenty gallons of water.
Pretty easy to imagine the results from multiple buckets.
However, when heated and continuously mixed
in the same experiment,
almost none of them had the precipitate or the crust
building up in the container,
even when we later removed the pump and heater.
So heating and properly mixing the salt
had a direct impact on the reduction of crusty formations
in the bin.
In fact, we repeated the test again with just mixing
for 24 hours in the ambient room temp water
starting at 70 degrees, and all but a couple
stayed thoroughly mixed,
so in that case, heat was really only required
for some salt options.
The first thing I'll share with you
is you should follow the instructions on the bucket.
They're there for a reason,
and the ones that ultimately did require heat
had that listed on the bucket.
That said, how much effort reefers put
into mixing the salt varies pretty wildly,
from pouring in the salt and giving it a quick spin
with a spoon to vigorous mixing for days in a heated vessel,
the answer lies somewhere in there,
depending on the raw materials
and formulation to make the specific salt.
48 hours of mixing in heated salt water
probably being something close to best practice,
but some requiring as little as an hour of thorough mixing
to prevent crusty formations.
I guess it kinda leads us to the number three way
to prevent the brown crust in your bin,
and maybe the most obvious or realistic,
use a salt that doesn't have the brown stuff to begin with,
and mixes easy without the need for heat
or prolonged mixing methods.
Again, all these salts have different source materials
and purification steps.
In one of those experiments, we ran twenty gallons
of the eight different mixed salt waters
through sediment filters,
and you can see there's an obvious difference.
Keep in mind, this is only 20 gallons.
An entire bucket would be roughly eight times that.
That said, this is an area where you get what you pay for.
The best performer in all these experiments
was the most expensive, with Tropic Marin's Pro-Reef,
the cost and the performance almost certainly related
to the pharmaceutical grade materials used to make the salt.
In the end, with a 100-gallon tank
with ten percent weekly water changes,
the highest performing salts
will cost about five bucks or more a month,
but to be frank, that's probably significantly cheaper
than heaters, reactors, sediment filters,
and power to run them to achieve a similar result.
An interesting intermediary option to that,
which balances performance on all the fronts that we tested,
most notably, easy mixing without precipitation,
but comes at a mid-level price point
was the Brightwell NeoMarine salt.
Also worth noting,
that's what the team at WWC uses predominantly
on their display and grow out systems.
All these experiments were pretty interesting,
particularly that one looking at the amount of precipitate
from salts mixed for an hour,
and then using the sediment filters
to gauge all the brown contaminants in the salt.
(funky synth beats) If you haven't seen it,
check it out.
In fact, that box down there is actually a shortcut
to all our best salt videos found in the category headers
of our site for easy reference.
See you next Wednesday with the next batch
of BRS TV Reef FAQs.