| The difference is HUGE...
Solar salt is regular sodium chloride... made from evaporating out the sea water leaving the salt residue. Solar salts usually have some beneficial minerals that are normally contained in sea water. If you see a bag of "solar salt" it will say something like 99.7% pure salt... the other .3% or so is the natural mineral content of the sea water and not harmful at all to our fish.
Epsom salt is actually magnesium sulfate and is only called "salt" because it fits within the generic definition of a salt. In chemists terms, a "salt" is a chemical compound that is formed by replacing all or part of the hydrogen ions of an acid with one or more cations of a base."
While we tend to think of salt as "table salt", in fact sodium chloride, just fits within the generic definition of "salt."
Magnesium sulfate is used in mammalian medicine to leach toxins from tissue. This is an osmotic ion transfer process that literally pulls the toxins out of the tissue. There is a long-standing and all together wrong old wive's tale that epsom salt will "cure" dropsy. This ain't the case, folks. Dropsy is not a toxin build up in the tissue and the osmotic/ion transfer process that allows epsom salts to work in mammalian tissue does not correlate to fish.
What epsom salts are good for is raising the GH levels in water. The formula for raising the GH levels with epsom salts is basically the same as using baking soda to raise KH levels... one pound of ES will raise the GH level 100 points in 700 gallons of water. This is not an exact formula but with GH, you only need to be close enough...
Where many go wrong with epsom salts is using it for the aforementioned dropsy treatment and killing the fish dramatically because of the rapid rise in the GH levels of the water. Goes back to my point about knowing the effects of chems and meds on the water before adding them.
The last point about epsom salts and GH levels is that the GH, which represents the permanent hardness or mineral content of our water, is achieved through magnesium content. While this is OK for most applications, it is not good for raising fry or building big fish as what these guys need is calcium for good bone development. So, as you consider adjusting the GH levels of your pond, consider your fish's calcium requirements first and then select the right additive for GH adjustment.
REC |