Very new to the hobby.
I have a 54g display + 11g sump = 65g total water. I have two baby clowns, royal gramma, lawnmower blenny, an astrea snail, and an emerald crab. Bio load is very low. Gramma, blenny and crab were just added yesterday. For corals, I have a xenia, paly and zoa-all frags so they are tiny.
I am dosing the pharma two part soda ash I bought off of BRS. Every time I finally get my alkalinity back up to normal range (8-8.5) and then leave it for a day, it drops down to 7-7.5 the next day. This is not just a normal degradation because calcium also spikes up to 500-550. Then I will slowly dose alk over a couple of days to get it back up, and then let it be, then it will drop again (and calcium will spike). This has repeated multiple times now. Why can I not keep this balanced?
One "weirdness" worth noting is that I also found my salinity to be high, around 1.030. I have slowly been changing water with RODI water over the past ~3 days and finally measured 1.026 today.
Another "weirdness" worth noting is that I have been overfeeding a bit, simply because my clowns are still getting used to eating and they don't see a lot of the food I put in the tank, forcing me to then put more food until they see it and eat some. Still, this is a microscopic amount of food due to having two tiny fish in a 54g tank compared to what I'm sure all of you have to put in every day.
Final thing worth noting is I am going through the ugly stage. There is some algae here and there (that's why I picked up the blenny and crab, and I put the first dose of Vibrant in yesterday) and my rocks are roughly 30-40% covered with some sort of orangeish-brown layer of gunk (cyano? not sure). Could those be "eating up" all the alk?
I have a 54g display + 11g sump = 65g total water. I have two baby clowns, royal gramma, lawnmower blenny, an astrea snail, and an emerald crab. Bio load is very low. Gramma, blenny and crab were just added yesterday. For corals, I have a xenia, paly and zoa-all frags so they are tiny.
I am dosing the pharma two part soda ash I bought off of BRS. Every time I finally get my alkalinity back up to normal range (8-8.5) and then leave it for a day, it drops down to 7-7.5 the next day. This is not just a normal degradation because calcium also spikes up to 500-550. Then I will slowly dose alk over a couple of days to get it back up, and then let it be, then it will drop again (and calcium will spike). This has repeated multiple times now. Why can I not keep this balanced?
One "weirdness" worth noting is that I also found my salinity to be high, around 1.030. I have slowly been changing water with RODI water over the past ~3 days and finally measured 1.026 today.
Another "weirdness" worth noting is that I have been overfeeding a bit, simply because my clowns are still getting used to eating and they don't see a lot of the food I put in the tank, forcing me to then put more food until they see it and eat some. Still, this is a microscopic amount of food due to having two tiny fish in a 54g tank compared to what I'm sure all of you have to put in every day.
Final thing worth noting is I am going through the ugly stage. There is some algae here and there (that's why I picked up the blenny and crab, and I put the first dose of Vibrant in yesterday) and my rocks are roughly 30-40% covered with some sort of orangeish-brown layer of gunk (cyano? not sure). Could those be "eating up" all the alk?