Is there a easier way to make my fish tank saltwater?
Don’t use table salt. It is deficient in minerals that seawater contains. If you search the Internet, you will find do-it-yourself recipes for marine salt mixes, but I don’t really recommend them. None of them that I know of are as good as the better commercial brands of marine aquarium salt, and you won’t really save all that much money. Even the big public aquaria don’t mix their own marine salt any more: they buy truckloads of Instant Ocean, Reef Crystals, or the like. As to pH, a good marine salt mix includes buffers that will set your pH somewhere around 8.2 – 8.4. If you need further buffering, there are pH buffers you can buy. If you live very close to the ocean, natural seawater is actually considered the best possible saltwater for a marine aquarium. When the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago opened in 1930, it had a fleet of tanker rail cars to bring seawater by train from the Gulf of Mexico to Chicago (the Shedd doesn’t do this anymore). The main problem with using real sea water is
