You can buy baking soda anywhere. Supermarkets, Walmart, even the Dollar Store. A box costs $0.99 and is perfectly safe for your reef. Baking Soda is sodium bicarbonate which can be used for baking, cleaning, and deodorizing. And we hobbyists use it to buffer the alkalinity level of our aquariums, too.
Years ago, our club's president handed me a coral dip sample from Fauna Marin. Turned out to be gold in a vial but I couldn't get more of it. I remember it working so well, but I figured it must have been a one-time thing that picked up zero traction and never made it to market. Fast forward a decade or more, I stumbled upon one of those vials in my massive aquarium-related stash of things. I was in cleaning-mode and threw out a lot of stuff that I'd been hoarding far too long, due to my "what if I need this some day?" mentality.
I've never been one to shy away from Lanthanum chloride, a product used in our hobby to bind up and export phosphate from a reef tank. Not only did I feel like I'd found the magic elixir the first time I used some, I've been a huge advocate for more than a decade. Two months ago at MACNA, Two Little Fishies introduced their version to the attendees named Phosban-L. Phosban has been a powdered version of GFO for a long time, used in a Phosban Reactor or similar device. Phosban-L is not just a liquid additive, it's a bottle of concentrated Lanthanum chloride.
Tank alkalinity has been somewhat low but I couldn't figure out why. My calcium reactor was full of media, the CO2 tank was full of gas, everything looked right. That's when I realized I was missing the point, that the pH measurement inside the reactor was not where it belonged. Normally it's between 6.1 to 6.5 depending on my mood, so to speak. The pH controller showed that it was 7.5 and my brain didn't click, that it wasn't 6.5... dumb mental error.
As hobbyists, we appreciate the need for a variety of interesting chemicals at our disposal, and usually we use them without incident. Tonight however was different, way way different. About a year ago I received a package with a few bottles of 35% peroxide.
Every few weeks, I get a message asking me if I'm dosing Prodibio and what specifically am I dosing. My preference has always been the big four: Biodigest, Bioptim, Stronti+, and Iodi+ which are all dosed back to back during the same session twice a month, on the 5th and on the 20th.
The above picture was taken with the iPhone X in Portrait Mode. I'm very impressed with the camera in my phone. :)
Recently I received a shipment of products from Brightwell Aquatics. I wanted to try out their Xport NO3 Brick and see if it can remove nitrate as advertised. My reef has plenty, so this is a good test. I tested nitrate last night.
This is a very interesting story, and thus I want to park it here on my site so I can find it in the future. Being able to detect cyanide to know if a fish is at risk or not is huge.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/can-we-ever-have-cyanide-free-aquarium-fish-180963255/
After making myself (literally) do all my water testing today on both systems, I'm quickly reminded why I prefer to only run one reef at a time. Those people that run multiple tanks or frag systems deserve heavy praise for being able to keep so many separate systems thriving. I noticed some bits of corals turning white in my reef, but I kept blaming it on shade rather than a water quality issue. Today, I ran through all the Elos test kits, twice since I have to measure the 400g reef as well as the 60g frag system.
