Mixing my own equilibrium equivalent

[danbryans]

Hey guys..was wondering if anybody could help me with a little problem i have.
As the title say's..i tried mixing my own equilibrium using dry K2S04, CaCl2, MgSO4 & MnSO4 and omitted the FeSO4 in 1L of distilled water. I referenced it to a fert calculator to try and get the exact amount (ratio's of each ingredient) I needed to get 3.4ppm of K at 10ml for a 35gal tank. Problem is with the mixing. There is some undissolved ingredients in my mix and it looks like it gonna stay that way. And so because of this i haven't tried using it yet. What am I doing wrong here? What do i need to do to dissolve all those chemicals completely? By the way I mixed 100g of K2SO4, 46.5 g of CaCl2, 55g of MgSO4 and 0.37 g of MnSO4 with a use of a gram scale ofcourse.

 

[VaughnH]

The easy, obvious way to avoid this problem is to use half the amounts of each chemical, then dose twice as much at one time. Or use twice as much water with the same amounts of chemicals, and dose twice as much at one time. There is a limit to how much you can dissolve into water.

 

[Tom Barr]

If you get very fine powdered chemicals, then they are much easier to dissolve.

Regards,
Tom Barr

 

[FacePlanted]

I have this problem when using equillibrium. There is a sediment that is really hard to dissolve. I use a mortar and pestle to grind it up very fine. Like Tom said--really fine powder. It works great. no problems dissolving the powder. I got a great mortar and pestle from aquariumplants.com.

-Mike B-

 

[evandro.carrenho]

Another thing that you need to consider is the solubility of each chemical. No matter how fine it is, there is a limit to solve in water.

If you go to wikipedia and search for a chemical, you will find a bunch of information about it, including the solubility, e.g. K2SO4 solubility in water is 11.1 g/100 ml at 20 °C.

Regards,
Evandro.

 

[Tom Barr]

The GH booster from alan is easier to dissolve than SeaChem Eq.

also, the newer Eq is better I think, I have a life time's supply of GH booster so it's been awhile since I've had a need to check

Regards,
Tom BARR

 

[danbryans]

VaughnH.. i was actually thinking just doubling the amount of water i have in that mix. Thanks for confirming.

Tom... Some of the stuff I already have lying around are in crystal form so I'm just trying to deplete them until I get them some more in powdered form.
As for the actual seachem eq. and GH booster..well those stuff are hard to comeby here that's why I thought why not just mix my own.

FacePlanted...we'll do that next time.

evandro.carrenho.. for K2SO4 and MgSO4 i referred to chuck gadd's calculator. But for the CaCl2 I just dumped it in.

Actually i made another mix after I saw the problem with the first one. I made CaCl2 and MgSO4 in one 500ml bottle. K2SO4 and MnSO4 in another 500ml bottle. Sliced the quantities of all ingridients in half. It's what I'm using since this sunday. We'll wait around for 2 weeks to see results.

Thanks so much guys!