- Joined
- Aug 11, 2018
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Hi Dan,
I see that you have gotten a lot of advice in a very short time frame, but I wanted to chime in as well and give you a bit of help from when I was a beginner. Mostly, I'll give you a few good suggestions that work generally well for this hobby, as well as some of the stuff that you can try out on your tank.
First and foremost, patience is key! This hobby requires a lot of it and nothing happens quickly. Small incremental changes will always get you farther than doing a lot of changes too quickly. When caring for corals, invertebrates, and fish, they prefer stability, hence lots of changes can become very stressful for them.
That being said, in your case, it looks like you may have had a bit too much white light which may have been killing your coral. LED's are incredibly powerful and can bleach and kill corals in hours even. Looks like you may have found a good schedule now, so I would stick with it and let the corals you have adjust to it. Then after some time, if you prefer, you can make small changes to the individual channels to tweak closer to the color you like. As a rule of thumb, blues/UV's/Violets are usually kept at high amounts, whites at medium to low amounts, and reds/yellows/greens should be a little to just tweak the color preference.
Anyways, I also notice that you use quite a lot of various media and supplements for your tank. A lot of those items are typically designed for tanks that are more established, have heavy coral concentrations, and large various micro fauna. For newer tanks, all of those things may actually create more problems than help. For example, I've seen here people suggesting using Amino Acids as a food supplement for coral, but overdosing aminos can in fact thin out the flesh on the coral, and cause it to die if other things create any stress on the coral. Your tank being still a young tank (they don't really mature until 1-2 years), you can have fluctuations in parameters that stress coral. Over dosing various supplementation may cause more issues than solve them. And overdosing a tank with very little coral is very easy to do.
If your LFS is using good water, you maintain a consistent water change schedule, and set up you light, you shouldn't even require any additives, at least at the beginning. Personally, that is what I would do.... I would head back to the basics. Do a weekly water change of 10-20%, use a bit of carbon only, and let the tank settle in. If you are able to place a skimmer somewhere, that would be great. If not, be careful about overfeeding the tank, especially if you attempt to feed your coral. Less is better in this situation. Then test parameters. Get a good tester for Nitrates and Phosphates and test. In most cases, a skimmer and carbon combined with weekly water changes may be sufficient to keep the water at the appropriate levels. If you notice your phosphates or nitrates climb (because you've tested that with a good tester) above the preferred amount, then and only then add media that removes nitrates and phosphates. In the alternative, if you are feeding a lot, reducing the frequency or amount you feed may be sufficient to keep parameters in place without adding media. Then make small changes in your routine: frequency of water changes, how much you change, what media and how much you use, and how much and how often you feed. Eventually you will find a good common ground where you can feed enough and keep the parameters in check. Then you'll only have to make adjustments if you have large changes. In the meantime, you'll create better stability for your tank and things will look a lot better.
After you get a hang of that, you can start experimenting with aminos, booster programs and whatnot to try to improve colors and growth of coral (if you arent happy with the results you'll be getting by then). I bet you though, that if you take it slow, go back to the KISS method and create stability, you'll find you'll be quite content with where you end up.
Thank you very much, I know patience is key and am going back to basics
