HCA: Hermit Crab Association

I'm going to add some additional substrate and was wondering if there is any reason I wouldn't want to heat my salt water up a bit before mixing it with my sand.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I always thought I had to use freshwater for sub? I just added ee and mixed up the compacted sub a few days ago and I made fresh warm fw to mix it up

Sent from my C5215 using Tapatalk

kieagcarm wrote:I always thought I had to use freshwater for sub? I just added ee and mixed up the compacted sub a few days ago and I made fresh warm fw to mix it up

Sent from my C5215 using Tapatalk

I've always used sw when soaking my sub. To keep the tank mold free. I also always misted with salt water whenever I needed to most. Never had any kind of mold issue. I recently read here that you shouldn't mist with sw because too much salt is an issue. Since I just recently did a full substrate swap and clean I'm going to switch my misting to fresh and see how it plays out. Still plan on soaking any substrate with salt water when it is first added though. Also soaked the drift wood i have in the tank with salt water.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I went ahead and warmed up some SW and added some more substrate. Mostly EE but i added a bit of play sand as well. Substrate level is up to about 5 inches. Should be good for these two as I've always had it at 3 in the past and never had any problems. Here is a couple of pics of them hiding from the paparazzi after they got back in the tank.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Remember, salt doesn't evaporate, while water will. Hence, salt concentration can reach extremely high levels, where you could burn your crabs or yourself when doing maintenance. (Plus, it's a lot of salt to go through, meaning more money spent!) I strongly reccomend mixing substrate with a heavily dilute amount of SW - basically brackish water - as the usual spills from the SW pool will increase salt concentration in your substrate over time anyway.

I'll keep that in mind for future substrate addition. How diluted would you recommend?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

i do a small splash in the ee and all the sand is fw. so my mix is maybe 2:1 sand to ee. about 1/4 sw the rest fw. some times i do a few more handfuls of ee. just depends on my tank at the time.


why did you want to heat the sub?

Just to help with the temp. My UTH doesn't seem to be hearing that well. I had changed out all the sub the other day and it just seemed really cold. Wanted to increase the level anyway and figured heating it up a bit first would help.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

DiTo wrote:I'll keep that in mind for future substrate addition. How diluted would you recommend?

I got by a half, even a quarter. Salt spray will naturally occur, so the salinity of the substrate will increase over time. As for the temp reading, has your house/the room seemed/been cooler than usual? If not, it could be the substrate becoming a "heat sink" and once at a higher temp, you should see an increase in temp. unless the temp is life threatening, I would just keep a eye on it for the next few days and see if there has been an increase.

I mix up my sub with dechlorinated warm fresh water and I mist with the same.

My sub is mixed with dechlorinated marine salt water and I mist occasionally with dechlorinated fresh water.

I make my EE with SW and while mixing it with playsand switch strictly to FW for mixing, rehydrating, and misting.