I think with the size of your tanks
@Janice buying high end salt wont cost that much more in the long haul, if you were doing 10% water changes on a 200g system every couple weeks than yeah that cost will add up awfully fast.
Agreed. All salts have advantages and disadvantages, there is no one perfect or better in all areas salt.
Personally I would say on your 16 gallon tank, any standard reef salt should be more then fine as long as the mixed results are on target for what you want. Some salts mix higher alk, cal, mag but it depends what you want to run. Unless you are doing a SPS specific tank, there is no need for the extra alk.
On a 16 gallon tank, your primary husbandry will be water changes. This tank falls under a nano tank which is very different then what most of us run. Most people running nano tanks stick to just weekly water changes and nothing else. I personally ran a JBJ 28 Gallon Nano Cube for about a year with nothing but weekly 5 gallon water changes with reef crystals. Literally nothing but water changes, no skimmer, no dosing, no phosphate removal or nitrate removal. That means a 200 gallon bucket lasted almost a year. I grew everything from zoas to sps in it. I did upgrade the tank to LED lights though.
