What supplements do you use?

[opihi]

I was reading a seachem sales booklet at work yesterday, and the product write ups were so good that it got me thinking that maybe i should be using some of this stuff. the products that interested me most were Reef Plus (trace elements & vitamins, suggested use is a food soak) and Reef Trace (trace elements).

do any of use use this stuff or other supplements? do you see any results?

i'm currently not using any supplements other than the occasional selcon soak. i'm in the process of swapping out IO for Oceanic salt, and do at least a 10% water change weekly.

[TippyToeX]

Just 10% weekly water changes and kalk dripping or slurry if I'm lazy. I add Selcon to the fish food. Feed the corals per their requirements. Nothing more than that. Oh, I also use IO salt mix.

Colors good, growth is excellent, water quality is spot on.

[jhcivicex]

I use evc two part and also Selcon for fish food. Works good so far.

[BRI7969]

If you can t test for don t use it

[Shak]

I also try to add darn near nothing to the tank, until about 2 weeks ago i used just B-Ionic 2 part. That was until my PH started dropping to 7.75-7.79 at night. I've never had a problem with PH, or maintaining a good balance between alk and calcium, until i switched to Oceanic. Over the last few weeks i've been struggling trying to figure out why this is happening, until I stumbled up a few threads outlining Oceanics problems concerning its low alkalinity, this is how it maintains 450+ CA lvls right out of the bag.

I thought i'd try using Seachem Reef Buffer to raise the alkalinity and PH and it seemed to be working, until I had an SPS start to RTN on me, and totally wiped it out overnight. Since then I have totally lost that SPS, as well as a 12" HUGE beautiful bright purple Elegance coral. So far those are the only two casualties.

I've changed nothing since I set up this system, except the salt, and the addition of the Reef Buffer.
SG- 1.025
Ammionia - 0
Nitrites - 0
Nitrates - 0
Phosphates - 0
CA - 450 before buffering, 325 after testing at end of last 2 weeks.
Alk - 2.06 meq/L before buffering, 3.54 meq/L after slowly raising over 2 weeks.
PH - High of 8.2 during the day, 7.75 at night (still fluctuating)
Temp - 79F at night, 80-81F during photoperiod (chiller kicks in)
Water changes - 15% bi-monthly during diagnosis period, usually 15% every 3 weeks.

I've calibrated PH meter twice over the two week period with 2 seperate lot numbers of calibration fluid, its accurate.

Not to derail the thread, but I thought I might post a warning concerning my switch to Oceanic salt, for what its worth.

[Shak]

Oh, thought I would also add this:

3/4 full Oceanic 90g salt container for sale cheap.
1/2 full Reef Buffer bottle (250g) free with purchase of salt above.

Going back to IO ASAP! Unless someone else can give any insight as to my dilemma.

My surviving SPS (9 species) are doing fine, although my A.Nobilis branches seem to have grown noticably thinner over the last 3-4 weeks (low alk causing it to shrink?).

[dallast]

i used to dose all kinds of products....too much reading the backs of everything i found in the lfs. i had my hair algae plague for over a year in both my 60 gal. and 6 gal. tanks. then i started dripping kalk for make-up water and using natural sea water (nsw) from sea water express and everything is peachy! my lights aren't special, only pc, but i get growth. every once and a while i add some magnesium/strontium/iodide to the mix. even add the reef plus (which, btw, makes you skimmer go wild -- i.e. turn it off for a couple hours!). but see no big changes with these.

i personally feel that the kalk and the nsw are the key factors to the health of my tanks. oh, and the frequent water changes (half gal. every 2-3 days in nano and 25% every 2-3 weeks in 60 gal.). i truly believe that the nsw is superior to artificial, as it should be! water quality is something i think most people take for granted...salt water is salt water. not true for me. low grade salt? high grade salt? how do you know?
anyway, my two cents for what it's worth!

[Nanighan]

Only frequent water changes, and kalk slurry every couple of days, depending if I haven't changed the water in some time. Frequent changes to me is about 5 gallons every 3 days max on a 135G tank.

[opihi]

Originally posted by BRI7969
If you can t test for don t use it

yes i usually say this to people as well, and it's definitely worth repeating here.

so dallas, no big change from using reef plus, huh? i'm a little disappointed to hear that. the marketing booklet says it's got vitamins a, b, c, d, blah, blah, blah and i thought it might be a good product to use.

matt: you and i talked about oceanic salt thru PMs, and i thought it might be worth mentioning here. i switched from IO to Oceanic because the low magnesium content of IO was making it hard to keep the CA up, even with massive water changes and dosing magnesium in my top off. i have not experienced low pH using Oceanic YET, but that be because i'm also using a CA reactor. also, LMK when you're down for trading... i got a couple new things.

thanks for the interesting responses, nothing better than reading about other reefers' experiences

jeff

[LVfishguy]

As I am sure Jeff already knows, I dose pretty much the whole line of seachem products at the store and it has been working fairly well for me. During my hair algae epidemic, I actually stopped dosing the reef plus though for obvious reasons.