I get a lot of reefers inquiring about do they really need to worry about their chemistry if they dose PCS Trace Elements.

"The oceans are salty. Each liter contains about 35 g of dissolved salts. The constituents of common salt are sodium and Chlorine. This make up more than 90% of this dissolved mass, and together with magnesium, sulfur and calcium, represent 99%. Add only three more elements—potassium, bromide  and carbon and you have more than 999 parts in a 1000 of the dissolved mass in seawater. Yet there are 82 other naturally occurring elements, and all are found dissolved in seawater, sometimes at extremely low concentration"

Although the PCS Trace Elements do contain some chemicals of the top six element group, these chemicals are for the corals daily consumption. So let look at the top six chemicals in you system. And what levels I like to keep them at.

But before you look at these, the first thing we must always test is salinity. Why??? Because chemicals are salts. Salinity is a measure of salts in your system. If you are lacking in salinity, then this will effect the test results that you will get of the top six elements. Always correct your salinity first.

There are the "all important" top three elements: Alkalinity, Calcium and Magnesium. Most of us know about these and their balance with each other. I keep Alkalinity around 148ppm (I work in ppm) or 8.3 dKH. Calcium needs to be balanced with the alkalinity at 420ppm. If this balance is out, then corals will find it harder to utilize the chemistry.  Magnesium around 1400ppm

But the next three are just as important: Strontium (14ppm) is for growth and color in the tips of SPS.  Potassium (450ppm) for pinks, reds. Boron (5ppm) promotes reds. If you forget these three, you using half the recipe to grow coral.

Trace elements make up only a very small part of the water in your system. But they are very important. They don't need to be added every day, as long as they are available for the corals to used. And for new cell growth. I have found that a dose every three days will keep good color and fast growth.

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