salinity 1.18

[special lighting]

is my salinity to low. My lfs said that it was perfect for 5 reasons.
1.fish could have more facilities of drinking water.
2. easier breeding purposes.
3. will keep all bad diseases and bacteria dead becaues they can not survive in that kind of salinity.
4.water evaporates and you add fresh water again.
5. i forgot.

[pat8you]

Your salinity should be higher. Most people keep their salinity at 1.025 or just slightly lower for fish only tanks around 1.022. More facilities of drinking water i'm not sure at all what they were talking about there. Never heard about it being easier to breed but i would think conditions that are closest to the natural environment would be the best for breeding. Lowering the salinity does help kill parasites and a few other nasty things but if you come to that situation you take the fish out and lower the salinity in a separate tank ( called a QT = quarintine tank) no matter what the salinity is you can top off the evaporated water with fresh to help maintian that salinity level. Keeping your salinity that low would prevent you from having any kind of inverts or corals as well as requireing you to have a very very long acclimation when ever you add fish.

[special lighting]

so with the salinity i have i will not be able to have corals

[pat8you]

so with the salinity i have i will not be able to have corals

That is correct. It would need to be at 1.025

[special lighting]

so when my water evaporates i add salt water to make it go up

[special lighting]

is it necesarry to have a quarantine tank

[pat8you]

so when my water evaporates i add salt water to make it go up

When water evaporates from your tank it leaves the salt behind which causes the salinity level in the tank to go up. So you add fresh water to balance that out and maintain the same salinity level.

is it necesarry to have a quarantine tank

It isn't technically required but it comes strongly suggested. When you get new fish you can keep them in there for a couple weeks to make sure they are healthy and prevent the spread of any illnesses or parasites. Things of that nature. Also if a fish does get sick you can put them in the QT so that you can treat them and dose medications if necessary.

You only need around a 10 gallon tank for your QT so they are cheap to set up and can save you a lot of trouble in the long run. Here is an article with more details.

[melosu58]

Looks like you already got good advice. I just wanted to back up a few things esp. the salinity. It needs to be higher. As far as for parasites it needs to be lower than 1.009 to be effective against them. If you read this you`ll see that Natural sea water is about 1.026 . Also as mentioned above always add FW to take care of any evaporated water.

[Ziggy953]

Just to be clear....your SG is 1.018 no 1.18 right?

[ryshark]

I hope it is 1.018 and not 1.18, To get your salinity up to around 1.025 just add saltwater for your daily top-offs instead of the regualr RO water and eventually you will be at 1.025 This is something you want to do gradually anyway. Especially when you are making it more salty you only want to go up by about .001 per day to be on the safe side. Once you get to around 1.025 if you have coral or 1.022 if you don't have coral then you can start adding RO water for you top-offs again.

[special lighting]

1.018