Any salt suggestions for a new tank?

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I use IO Reef Crystals and have been happy with it. Tropic Marin or TM Pro Reef are supposed to be *the* salt.
 
I don't like Instant Ocean at all. doesn't fully dissolve even after 24 hours, and has high alk/low calcium.

I've switched to Oceanic and love it.
 
I use both Oceanic Natural Sea Salt Mix and IO. This was intented to be a side by side. I ordered 200G Ocenaic and 160G (Big as I could find) IO. So far Oceanic is kicking IO's but. The corals look 10x better then when I water change with IO. Which actually says alot considering they always look about 5x better using ANY salt! ; ) I have looked at a couple studies comparing several of the mixes and while not perfect studies they pretty much show that no mix has all of everything (After all we would not need to use their fine additives! ) Notable is that Oceanic is almost powder like and will mix very easy. (Which I like cause Im lazy..) IO is like table salt or worse and can take some time to desolve properly. Other than that, neither in my comparison thus far provide enough (No where NEAR) mg. Also with out dosing ca over time your ca levels will drop which tells me not quite enough ca there either to sustain the 400 - 450ppm most reefers shoot for. ph and alk seem ok in both however they both seem to get you only to jjuuusssttt above nsw at about 8.3 dkh. I still use kent's buffer to kick it up to 9 or 10 dkh. ph seems to stay steady from both mixes at around 8.2. I base my new favorite salt (Oceanic) on the way the corals and inverts react which in my observations has been much more positve and colorful than using IO. Don't get me wrong, I am still an IO fan, but I suspect I will be using them both for quite a while longer. I personally do not even consider any of the other brands based on other peoples testing. Reef Crystals I believe is made by the same company as IO, so there may or may not be a diff in those 2..

GL!
 
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