In my opinion, it's not so much the use of baking soda as it is people going out using products completely unrelated to aquarium keeping to save a few dollars. Yes, you can throw your water way off if you use massive amounts baking soda in an attempt to regulate pH. Yes, it can cause massive algae outbreaks, but those are only side issues.
It's people that come up with some untested method to resolve a problem and with no real proof, and then think they came up with a real solution.
I remember seeing one post, on another reef forum, about how one person uses two brands of salt. He did this because brand A was high in calcium, but low in alkalinity, and brand B was low in calcium but high in alkalinity. Now on the surface, in a way, this makes sense, but they missed the point. They have no real idea why one salt reads differently, and they have no idea what else may be missing from one salt or the other, or if one salt might react with the other during the mixing stage. When you think about it, they would have been much better off finding a salt that gave reasonable readings for both components.
There are several other areas where using a non-aquarium additive could be ok. For example, for a one time calcium boost, you could use lab grade calcium chloride. I don't see a real problem here. I do see a problem where people recommend using something like calcium chloride made for ice melting for that calcium boost. The ice melting mixture isn't very pure, after all, it's just going to melt ice, so if it's 95% calcium chloride, that's fine. It's certainly not what I'd want to use on my reef.
A big part of this is that many people never seem to consider the possible cost savings against the possible loss of all your livestock. For some reason, some people think it's ok to save $2 while risking there livestock that could total hundreds or thousands of dollars. In my book, this is very foolish.
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