Ron,
I noticed your article on artifical sea salts that is posted on the Catalina Water Company website. (http://www.catalinawater.com/Report.htm) My understanding is this article first appeared in the March 2003 issue of Reefkeeping.
I just tried the Catalina Ocean water, as it has started showing up in PetCo's around the country and so is now available in Boston, although the price is very high, about $2 per gallon. I first read your article, and so figured using this water would be pretty safe even though having grown up in Los Angeles, putting water from Long Beach harbor in my tank did concern me a bit. Anyway, one observation I had was that the Catalina Water Company water foams up a lot when poured from their shipping containers, which is a strong indicator for the presence of organics in the water. I understand that with the artificial salts, given that they are mixed with distilled (or DI or RO) water and the salts, one would presume, are inorganic salts, that doing an organic analysis would not normally suggest itself in a comparison test between salts. Especially when the ocean water was used as a comparison standard. But I might suggest that if you expand or repeat this comparison test, that in the analysis, you might want to do an analysis that includes some type of dissolved organic load, at least for the real ocean water. My understanding from emails with the Catalina folks is that they run it through a 15 micron and 5 micron filter (someplace on their web page, they indicated that they also UV sterilize the water), but they did not indicate any chemical filtration.
Anyway, I have not observed any problems, but as I mentioned above, if you repeat or extend this salt comparison study, I would be curious to see an analysis of the dissolved organic load, at least for the real ocean water.
I noticed your article on artifical sea salts that is posted on the Catalina Water Company website. (http://www.catalinawater.com/Report.htm) My understanding is this article first appeared in the March 2003 issue of Reefkeeping.
I just tried the Catalina Ocean water, as it has started showing up in PetCo's around the country and so is now available in Boston, although the price is very high, about $2 per gallon. I first read your article, and so figured using this water would be pretty safe even though having grown up in Los Angeles, putting water from Long Beach harbor in my tank did concern me a bit. Anyway, one observation I had was that the Catalina Water Company water foams up a lot when poured from their shipping containers, which is a strong indicator for the presence of organics in the water. I understand that with the artificial salts, given that they are mixed with distilled (or DI or RO) water and the salts, one would presume, are inorganic salts, that doing an organic analysis would not normally suggest itself in a comparison test between salts. Especially when the ocean water was used as a comparison standard. But I might suggest that if you expand or repeat this comparison test, that in the analysis, you might want to do an analysis that includes some type of dissolved organic load, at least for the real ocean water. My understanding from emails with the Catalina folks is that they run it through a 15 micron and 5 micron filter (someplace on their web page, they indicated that they also UV sterilize the water), but they did not indicate any chemical filtration.
Anyway, I have not observed any problems, but as I mentioned above, if you repeat or extend this salt comparison study, I would be curious to see an analysis of the dissolved organic load, at least for the real ocean water.
