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

Gav said:
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?

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I feed mostly Rods complete reef food and not even that much or that often. Approximately 1 cm square per day. A few days of the week I feed a pinch of new life spectrum pellets instead. At night I add a couple drops of KZ Pohls coral vitalizer.

As for lights, 12 hours a day. 12 hrs for the blue LEDs, 9.5 hrs for the white LEDs and 7 hours for the T5s.
 
Well, for what it's worth I agree with the posts about your rock leaching. Do you have any coraline growth on that dry rock? What GFO are you running? I ran some rowaphos about a year ago when i started my 90 and GHA broke out everywhere. I switched to BRS and it was gone in 2 weeks.

Your paramaters look fine, running some carbon in your reactor may help you with nitrates. Do you run a fuge?
 
babbyk said:
Well, for what it's worth I agree with the posts about your rock leaching. Do you have any coraline growth on that dry rock? What GFO are you running? I ran some rowaphos about a year ago when i started my 90 and GHA broke out everywhere. I switched to BRS and it was gone in 2 weeks.

Your paramaters look fine, running some carbon in your reactor may help you with nitrates. Do you run a fuge?
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I had a ton of coralline growth on the rocks prior to this situation. It doesn't seem to be out competing the other algae growth now.

I purchased a large pack of mixed hermit crabs from reefcleaners that cleaned it all up in a few days, but I think they're just keeping it at bay for now.

I'm running the basic BRS GFO right now. I was actually considering switching to rowaphos next but maybe not. I've been changing it about every two weeks. I also keep a filter bag of phosguard sitting in the sump to help.

No refugium setup. I only have two chambers in my sump.
 
Howdy, I agree with then others try to keep the water changes smaller. We tend to freak out when things don't go well and we sometimes over do things when sometimes we need to let our setups and ecosystems get a chance to work things out.

I would also recommend chemipure blue elite. It will get your water uncloudy, I've used it in two of my,systems and it works wonders, just have to replace every 2 months. I also have phosbond and that works just as well...a nice complement. I would also challenge the temperature, I personally like my temps around 75-77. Easier said then done sometimes. Might help with your algae.

I would also recommend supplementing your tank with some items from the aquavitro line. It is some really good stuff, if your finding your having a hard time keeping your tank stable with just water changes.

Do you feed your corals at all?

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I think my flow is alright. I have two jebao rw8's but they're not cranked up. It's been difficult trying to make everything happy in a mixed reef in terms of flow through the aquascape.

I don't target feed any of my corals, apart from the coral vitalizer drops. Just use Rods food and broadcast feed it.

It might be pretty hard to get the temp down to that range, I'm already struggling with that this summer. I've had to put a fan directly over the tank and my evaporation can get as high as 2.5 gallons a day. Because of that fact I was just thinking that maybe all the evaporation is throwing in too much kalk throughout the day causing the cloudiness and possibly pH problems. I've reduced my kalk in the meantime while I still have the fan running over the tank.
 
IMHO: like Nino, joe and Jason said and maybe a few others. Leave the tank alone for a few weeks. Get a log for testing and do them every week or twice a week. This will tell you what the tank is doing. If you start adding this and adding that you will never get it ironed out. You need to test mg, alk, cal, no3 and po4. Then you can see a pattern/ problem and correct it.

Don't change anything at this point. This is not a sprinters hobby.
 
Yeah, I had a hard time with my temp too, I was getting big swings and dumping top off a lot everyday. That's why it's so much easier said then done to lower it. I had to just leave my ac in the house on most of the time.

As far as the flow, I would just take a look at where the gha is growing and see if that part is getting any flow to those areas. Like you said with a mixed reef it's hard to keep eveything happy. But that's what's fun about this hobby is the need to rearrange rock work to optimize everything.

For the the cloudiness, I really would go get chemipure blue elite. At least give it a try if you never have. As for the ph swings. I would test ph during the day and once at night when the lights have been off for a bit. You might be getting huge ph swings especially with all the evaporation (maybe test your RO water too) And that low ph can be causing your sps to be doing poorly.



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reefaddiction said:
Yeah, I had a hard time with my temp too, I was getting big swings and dumping top off a lot everyday. That's why it's so much easier said then done to lower it. I had to just leave my ac in the house on most of the time.

As far as the flow, I would just take a look at where the gha is growing and see if that part is getting any flow to those areas. Like you said with a mixed reef it's hard to keep eveything happy. But that's what's fun about this hobby is the need to rearrange rock work to optimize everything.

For the the cloudiness, I really would go get chemipure blue elite. At least give it a try if you never have. As for the ph swings. I would test ph during the day and once at night when the lights have been off for a bit. You might be getting huge ph swings especially with all the evaporation (maybe test your RO water too) And that low ph can be causing your sps to be doing poorly.



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I picked up some Chemipure Elite a couple days ago and through it in the sump. I was already running a bag of carbon from BRS so I didn't really know what to expect. But wow, I woke up this morning (about 36 hrs post Chemipure addition) and the tank is shockingly clear. So far I think this is clearer than passively running the BRS Rox carbon ever got it. Thank you for the suggestion!
 
So I've been letting the tank try to settle it out and stabilize. After adding the chemipure the water cleared up like I already said, and the algae cut back severely. But the nitrates continue to rise to levels I've never seen before; above 80 ppm on the API test kit.

For the most part it looks like things are looking better but I don't get the nutrient rise. Overall, I've probably been feeding less heavily than the normal routine. I'm already at a high daily dose of vinegar, any advice on increasing that more? Im at 96 ml/day right now.
 
Since my phosphate is reading less than 0.025, could I actually have phosphate deficit and the N to P ratio be out of whack?
 
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Keep an eye on your alk and ph when dosing .I was vodka dosing last year,my alk and ph dropped and crashed my tank in less than a week. GFO will usually cause your alk to drop also.
 
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