MyDogIsStill#1
New member
Topping off with saltwater ----
Think of it this way. Instead of it being salt pretend we are adding marbles to the water. Lets make it easy and say we have a ten gallon tank and every day we add one gallon of water for evaporation.
now in that 10 gallon tank we have nine gallons of water and one gallon of marbles. a 9 to 1 ratio.
a day goes by and 1 gallon of water evaporates, not the marbles because marbles dont evaporate(like salt) leaving us with an 8 to 1 ratio.
now we need to get back to our set 9 to 1 ratio in order to keep everything healthy and consistent. So we would only need to add 1 gallon of water.
But, if you top off with the same 9 to 1 ratio as with what's in the tank you are increasing the ratio of marbles to water.
So in that day off topping of with marble water you have gone from 9 to 1 to 8.9 to 1.1. That would be increasing over time the amount of marbles in your tank and could become toxic to your fish.
After time the ratio would keep increasing 8.8/1.2 8.7/1.3 etc. but what i am saying is the salt errrrr marbles will keep increasing.
now obviously the results are allot less drastic in a tank the size of yours, but the build up is just the same.
If you are worried about dumping fresh water into your tank, look at something like this
http://cgi.ebay.com/Litermeter-Beat...ultDomain_0&hash=item3a5c6fd6f1#ht_866wt_1137
you can set it to do a few drips a minute keeping the salinity rock steady and dossing your additives at the same time. Just don't set it too fast or you could overflow your tank. I fill up a 7 gallon beer brewers bucket once a week with water and calc and a few other additives and let it go. No daily topoffs. Just let it draw from that. I have to do seasonal changes to the flow rate because my evaporation goes way up in the summer.
Think of it this way. Instead of it being salt pretend we are adding marbles to the water. Lets make it easy and say we have a ten gallon tank and every day we add one gallon of water for evaporation.
now in that 10 gallon tank we have nine gallons of water and one gallon of marbles. a 9 to 1 ratio.
a day goes by and 1 gallon of water evaporates, not the marbles because marbles dont evaporate(like salt) leaving us with an 8 to 1 ratio.
now we need to get back to our set 9 to 1 ratio in order to keep everything healthy and consistent. So we would only need to add 1 gallon of water.
But, if you top off with the same 9 to 1 ratio as with what's in the tank you are increasing the ratio of marbles to water.
So in that day off topping of with marble water you have gone from 9 to 1 to 8.9 to 1.1. That would be increasing over time the amount of marbles in your tank and could become toxic to your fish.
After time the ratio would keep increasing 8.8/1.2 8.7/1.3 etc. but what i am saying is the salt errrrr marbles will keep increasing.
now obviously the results are allot less drastic in a tank the size of yours, but the build up is just the same.
If you are worried about dumping fresh water into your tank, look at something like this
http://cgi.ebay.com/Litermeter-Beat...ultDomain_0&hash=item3a5c6fd6f1#ht_866wt_1137
you can set it to do a few drips a minute keeping the salinity rock steady and dossing your additives at the same time. Just don't set it too fast or you could overflow your tank. I fill up a 7 gallon beer brewers bucket once a week with water and calc and a few other additives and let it go. No daily topoffs. Just let it draw from that. I have to do seasonal changes to the flow rate because my evaporation goes way up in the summer.
If you look at my prior posts on this thread, Derrick, I'm actually trying to help you keep your thread open and going.
