I was keeping my SG around 1.024 & was getting awesome growth. I brought it up to 1.026 & a couple of my corals look like they've bleached out. I'm going to bring it back down & see if their colors come back.
The salinity is the only change I've made in the past year.
How fast did you make the change? Changing sg too quick seems to be more of an issue than the resulting sg IMHO.
My sg is low right now due to a faulty hydrometer. I'm slowly upping it back to 1.024/ 25 that seems to be the happy place for my tank, but again I've noticed it can handle higher and lower as long as te change isn't made too quickly. IMHO I think this is why an ato is a needed part of a system. Or at least adding top off water on a strict regiment.
My tank sits at about 1.024 with alk at 9.1-9.2 I dose a home made 2 part variant of Randy's reciepe ( thanks Randy ) .
My Ca sits around 420-430 mg @ 1200-1350 ( I just got a test kit so I can now tune it in) and my ph is 8.1-8.2
After playing around I dose 20ml of ca alk and 10 of mg nightly. I run a fuge on opposite a lighting. And I dose strontium / Moly 2-3 times a week and perform ~10% water changes. I used to be anti water changes, but it was out of shear laziness. My new setup is bucketless & boy was it worth while.
1.024 seems to $ for me , but I'm always looking for more growth.
@iam 12-13 is a bit high, but from what I've read as of late, 10-12 should yield higher growth for sps's. ( info via read sea's website)
For most coral 7-12 is great. How many fish do you have and how old is your tank? I noticed that older established tanks with higher fish load seems to want to sit around 7. Newer tanks and those with lower fish loads tend to sit at 11-12. Maybe this is just due to the way I keep my system... Anyone else have tips on raising alk aside from buffering the heck of of it??( pls excuse the spelling and or rambling, I'm posting from my phone)