I know some have used Turface MVP or Pro League Gray back when they made it, but I haven't been able to find any good posts about the Champion Brown version.
My goal was to find a calcined clay substrate locally (no tractor supply here) that buffered and had good CEC, and I knew this would do both. The question was, how well? This will be a kind of review/journal on this substrate.
I didn't want to spend a ton on commercial soils as I'm looking at setting up about 100 gallons of new tanks in my garage (yay for pallet racks), and I figured $20 for a 50lb test was a good place to start.
I thoroughly rinsed numerous batches in a sieve first, then a 2 gallon bucket, and no matter what, it still had quite a bit of dust going into the tank. Most of it stayed suspended well enough that a few water changes cleaned most of that up.
Next steps is to monitor effects on pH and precharge this with CaSO4, MgSO4, and a little K2SO4. I'll try my best to document how much is getting stripped. Once stabilized, I'll drop some PRL culls in there and see how they do.
Tap is 1-2 dKH and 7.2-7.4 pH depending on the time of year. This substrate stripped all KH, and it is currently buffering to 6.3. Hopefully it stays this way








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