Tank problems are pushing me to the brink of throwing in the towel..

adubson

adubson

New member
I started a thread here a month or so ago on my alkalinity issues, and my tank continues to deteriorate despite all my effort to stop it.

My tank is about 9-10 months old now. The first 7 months of that was clean sailing, with all kinds of SPS looking great and coloring up when put into my tank. Then, I woke up one morning and a strawberry shortcake mini colony was undergoing RTN, and it was gone before my eyes. Ever since then, nothing has been the way it was in my tank. Initially, the alk dropped off all of a sudden from where I kept it at 9, to 6. For the life of me, I could not raise that for weeks. Water change after water change, purchased new equipment, starting 2 part dosing...nothing. Finally, over the last couple weeks my alk is back to the stable 9-10, BUT everything else is absolute crap.

Over this period of trying to bring back stability to the tank, I've lost corals all over the place. I've also gone through a gnarley GHA outbreak. As you would guess due to the GHA, my nutrients sky rocketed over this period. Which caught me by surprise since I have been maintaining nitrates at 0 since beginning vinegar dosing in January. Now my nitrates, climb faster than ever. I have been changing my felt filter socks out every other day, as that's how long it takes for them to go completely brown. What is going on in my tank??? Where are all these nutrients coming from??

Numbers for the 75 gallon:
Temp - 79.8
pH - 8.2 (API)
Nitrates - 20 ppm (API)
Nitrites - 0 (API)
Ammonia - 0 (API)
Phosphates - 0-0.025 (NYOS phosphate kit)
Alk - 9.69 (Hanna)
Ca - 400 (API)
Mag - 1440 (NYOS)

Eshopps S-120 skimmer
2xEvergrow D120 LEDs + 2x39W T5 diy kit from BRS
2xJebao RW-8s

Randy's 2 part recipe and vinegar dosed via Jebao DP-4 dosing pump
ATO with Kalk (1.5 tsp/gallon)

Fish:
Blue throat trigger
Foxface
2 occelaris clowns
Diamond watchmen goby
Flame angel

All the test results are from just now. I'm about to do a 30% water change. I have the week off, so I'm just going to keep the RO/DI water coming and do successive large water changes over the week.
 
Last edited:
How often are u doing water change? Your numbers look fine. You probably don't need a water change.
Maybe leave it alone for now and let everything settle slowly. Your extra nutrients were coming from dying corals. It won't get better overnight. It will take weeks before you can see improvements. Your best bet is to keep tank stable, so don't do water change if parameters look fine.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
When u added rock was dry and clean ? Might be adding nutrients with all the new stuff your adding
 
I have 75 lbs of rock in there. 65 was dry BRS reef saver rock, and the other 10 was cured rock from reefwise about 6 months ago.
 
ColaAddict said:
How often are u doing water change? Your numbers look fine. You probably don't need a water change.
Maybe leave it alone for now and let everything settle slowly. Your extra nutrients were coming from dying corals. It won't get better overnight. It will take weeks before you can see improvements. Your best bet is to keep tank stable, so don't do water change if parameters look fine.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Click to expand...

I agree. With Nino. Just pic at alfgea if you must. But I would just let it go for a ride at this point and reestablish stability
 
ColaAddict said:
How often are u doing water change? Your numbers look fine. You probably don't need a water change.
Maybe leave it alone for now and let everything settle slowly. Your extra nutrients were coming from dying corals. It won't get better overnight. It will take weeks before you can see improvements. Your best bet is to keep tank stable, so don't do water change if parameters look fine.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Click to expand...

My routine for water changes was 20% every other week.

I forgot to mention this, but what tipped me to the point of posting this now was it getting worse all of a sudden over the past few days after looking somewhat better prior to that. 2 or 3 days ago, the water randomly became murky, and it still is. I woke up this morning, and I lost my little red dragon colony overnight after it looking fine through all of this.
 
With the SPS, it will probably look worse, before it get's better. It doesnt take much to start killing them. Then it takes weeks before you see improvements.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I'm willing to bet that the rock you got from brs is slowly leaching phos4 into your tank. Dry rock is known for that. Like mentioned, best bet is to let it finishing curing. Just continue to do routine water changes and add a nice cuc. It's eventually fix itself.
 
You can run a GFO reactor to get phosphate under control. Or using chaeto or any macro algae for nutrient export the natural way!
 
Just my oppion but i truely believe a tank isnt ready enough for sps til its about a yr old. Now i know people here have tanks that r young and keep sps but most do have some issues like some sps do better then others or the colors just aint right. Most of the nice sps tanks have been running for yrs mines been running for over ten and all my sps r great i dont even acclimate corals or fish and been about three months on water change right now and u cant even tell. The system is just running on auto pilot . If u give it time yours will too we all fushed money down the drain thats just the hobby fish and coral. Give it time keep it stabile sometimes water changes hurt the system more then helps specially big water changes . If u want to do water changes that much id do smaller ones good luck. From my experiance alk needs to be the most stabile and calcium needs to be kept up too not so much stabile as alk but kept in a high enough parameter then let u skimmer and equipment do the rest. Most likely the rock is leeching and u have to wait it out thats the issue with dry rock so much death inside it
 
Some real good advice here, small water changes and keep your akalinity stable and some gfo would help out with the phosphates.
 
Nitrates could be coming from your fish food. What are you feeding? How much and how often?

Blue Throats can pound through a lot of food. Perhaps as he's grown in size you've had to add more food to the tank and the system just can't keep up with it.

Also how long are the lights on for?

Sent from my SM-N900T using Tapatalk
 
A dual GFO and carbon reactor will help reduce your phos and clear up your water column. Chaeto is also a low risk method of managing nutrients.
I don't think you need your alk to be as high as 9. You can have it around 8-8.5. As long as it's stable. Not sure vodka is necessary if you're having trouble keeping alk up, especially if you're only putting in 1.5 tsp/g. You can go up to 2 tsp/g. Kalk supplemented with dosing alk/calc should be enough to get that stable.
 
Thanks for all the advice so far everyone.

I started running a GFO reactor right about when all these issues started, and that's when I got the nutrient spikes and algae outbreaks, so I don't know what that's about. I run carbon passively in a bag in a sump at the moment. Thinking about running both in the reactor.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top