The BEST water parameters!!!

jm23

jm23

Active member
I know many of you, like me, always want our tanks to have the ideal water conditions so our corals look great and grow quickly, but there is a lot of varying opinions on this subject. Well I put together a spreadsheet on over 100 TOTM tanks from 4 different forums (reefcentral, reef2reef, chicagoreefs, and ultimatereef) and took the averages and **insert creative exclamation by Walt!***, out comes the best water parameters. Let me just note that some TOTM tanks did not have enough data, but were still included with a link so you could still check them out. I also did not included the parameters on NPS tanks as I didn't want them to skew the averages. The data on salinity for 35 ppm was recorded at 1.026 even though it is higher, so the average could probably be slightly higher. Also Nitrates and Phosphates were not included as the general trend amongst TOTM winners is to have very low numbers. I also included DT gallons, but not total system volume as I already had enough data to convert (thanks to the Brits) and didn't feel like crunching the numbers on each sump and frag tank attached. Some of these systems have larger sump and frag tanks water volume then DT volume.

So here are my results:

DT Gallons: 201
Temperature: 78.76
Salinity: 1.0255
PH: 8.1
Calcium: 426.97
Alkalinity: 8.39
Magnesium: 1343

While we all know there is far more to having a successful reef tank, I hope this data can give people a number to shoot for and tweak their tanks parameters from there to best fit your goals. Here is the link: Tank of the Month Data 2010-2014


Happy reefing!
 
Last edited:
Aquaman said:
is this for mixed reef... or just lps..or just sps.... ?
Click to expand...

If you look at the tank of the month winner spreadsheet, you will find that most of them are primarily SPS tanks. I think though that the difference between a successful SPS tank and an LPS tank or ZnP tank is lighting and water flow, not water parameters. Again these are just the averages of tank of the month winner tanks and you will see some tank of the month winners that have parameters that are far different than the average.
 
I need to update this list with the new TOTM winners. I should also note, as I did in the other forum I posted this, that you will see several TOTM winners have maintained successful reef tanks with parameters that would be considered outliers on the spreadsheet. One thing that is consistent among these tanks is stability, keeping those parameters the same all the time. If you look through the spreadsheet you will find that the averages are actually very close to what the majority of the TOTM winners keep their parameters at, which isn't always the case when you take an average. Also in hindsight the title of this thread sounds a little cocky, but it was more a result of key words I used in my google search when starting up my first tank.

(Got to love a proud dad, that even after you are almost 30 still makes an account just to post a comment on your thread)
 
jm23 said:
So here are my results:

DT Gallons: 201
Temperature: 78.76
Salinity: 1.0255
PH: 8.1
Calcium: 426.97
Alkalinity: 8.39
Magnesium: 1343

Here is the link: Tank of the Month Data 2010-2014
Click to expand...

Okay, the link has been updated. Here are the new results (not much of a change though):

DT Gallons: 204.8
Temperature: 78.65
Salinity: 1.0256
PH: 8.1
Calcium: 428.05
Alkalinity: 8.40
Magnesium: 1345
 
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