Need advice. Salinity question
Aquarium photo in comments below!
Hello, so recently, I took over care for a saltwater tank at my employer’s healthcare clinic. Very new to saltwater have never had a tank myself. I keep a 75 gallon of freshwater tank at home and I’ve always been interested in keeping saltwater aquarium.
The previous caretaker had to leave temporarily due to surgery. So I am keeping this tank for the next six weeks. I would like to do the animals right by keeping the current environment in the most ideal conditions as possible.
The clinic has test strips as far as checking parameters. Nothing really stood out based on the test strips color. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the test strips. One thing that did stand out, though when I tested the salinity of the water, it tested at 1.022 specific gravity and I believe that’s on the low end as far as the salt content should be I went to the mix tank found that he had left it about half empty so so I added RODI water. I let that mix for 24 hours tested the water and the specific gravity came to 1.013 using a I think it was bulk reef supplies saltwater calculator I added the remaining salt to the mix tank. I waited 24 hours to recheck the water and the salinity came to 1.025. This is about 150 gallons.
I had noticed that the ATO system within those couple days had added about 3/4 of its quantity I’m thinking it’s 20 gallons.
Following the advice of the caretaker before me, I only removed about 90 -100 gallons from the display tank. And replenished with the mixed tank water and then waited another day recheck the salinity of the aquarium from the sump and found the salinity to be 1.021.
Is 1.021 ok over the weekend or should I do another water change and raise it? I have a new batch of mixed salt water that I targeted for a specific gravity of 1.027 based on the calculators that should raise the aquarium water to 1.023.
I was told the total volume is about 420 gallons. The mix tank is 150 gallons.
Inhabitants;
No corals,no anemones
1 shrimp, 5-10 hermit crabs and approx 20 fish
Unfortunately I don’t know the names/types of all the fish. Hopefully some are visible in the photo.
My favorite is the 1x dragonet. At the expense of sounding like an idiot and not remembering what I looked up yesterday there’s a fox fish?
I took photos on my work phone but left that at work so sry no help there.