Curious as to who is dosing trace and / or amino additives.
Product
Results
For trace elements I have been using Knop Koralvit Combi and Amino supplement from Korralin - AminoLife. Both have, IMO kept the corals in my sps system colored up and healthy with virtually no water changes (I have changed 10 gal. on a 120 display - 40g sump, 30g fragfarm) since I fired up the sump in late Dec. Display didn't get wet until early Jan. Everything was started with mostly aged water from other systems, fully cured aged rock and live washed sand (in fuge) from other systems. Display sand was new.
For the last 2+ months, I've added weekly dose of TM's Reef Actif, and seeing bolder colors now.
I just ran out of the Knop trace supplement and have finally found and ordered TM's Pro Coral A- and K+, 2 part trace additive.
One of your chemist members could only make a concentrated trace additive in 2 parts, as certain elements would fall out of solution (if I remember correctly) so the new TM product seemed worth a try.
As a tangent to this already long post, the TM (Tropic Marin) rep explained the trend in Europe has been to run captive reef Alkalinity lower than we typically do - at around 6.5 - 7.5 dKH. The reason, he said, was that the Calcium uptake is much higher in hard corals, and that the obvious benefit was better color and faster growth. He also talked about the importance of maintaining a Mg to Ca relationship at around 3:1.
Right now (home injured) I'm trying to figure out tuning my Ca reactor down to maintain Alk at 7 'ish dKH, and adding TM's Bio Calcium and Bio Magnesium to keep them up around 400 ppm and 1200+ ppm respectively.
I think it will be interesting to try for 6 months or so.
Product
Results
For trace elements I have been using Knop Koralvit Combi and Amino supplement from Korralin - AminoLife. Both have, IMO kept the corals in my sps system colored up and healthy with virtually no water changes (I have changed 10 gal. on a 120 display - 40g sump, 30g fragfarm) since I fired up the sump in late Dec. Display didn't get wet until early Jan. Everything was started with mostly aged water from other systems, fully cured aged rock and live washed sand (in fuge) from other systems. Display sand was new.
For the last 2+ months, I've added weekly dose of TM's Reef Actif, and seeing bolder colors now.
I just ran out of the Knop trace supplement and have finally found and ordered TM's Pro Coral A- and K+, 2 part trace additive.
One of your chemist members could only make a concentrated trace additive in 2 parts, as certain elements would fall out of solution (if I remember correctly) so the new TM product seemed worth a try.
As a tangent to this already long post, the TM (Tropic Marin) rep explained the trend in Europe has been to run captive reef Alkalinity lower than we typically do - at around 6.5 - 7.5 dKH. The reason, he said, was that the Calcium uptake is much higher in hard corals, and that the obvious benefit was better color and faster growth. He also talked about the importance of maintaining a Mg to Ca relationship at around 3:1.
Right now (home injured) I'm trying to figure out tuning my Ca reactor down to maintain Alk at 7 'ish dKH, and adding TM's Bio Calcium and Bio Magnesium to keep them up around 400 ppm and 1200+ ppm respectively.
I think it will be interesting to try for 6 months or so.
