Xhris
New Member
The past 24 hours have been very strange for my tank as I goofed it up royalty. Tank is about 6 months old, mostly torch frags (about 10) a large hammer and frog spawn, and a medium favia. Its been very stable for the past 45 days.
Yesterday afternoon at at about 1:00 PM I accidentally turned my Apex from "Auto" to "On" and it ran for the next few hours dosing Soda Ash (BlkReefSupply) into the water. I caught the mistake at about 3PM, in that time frame I dosed about 388ML of ALK. The tank spiked from 8.02 to 13.97 (which works out based on the dosing math)
When we got home the tank was slightly cloudy, but not terrible. I verified the Alk with a RedSea test just to ensure everything was working properly. I was getting 14 on the test as well - in other threads we read about not creating a downward spike we did a quick 5 Gallon water change, and changed a second DOS from daily water changes to a manual water change of 20 gallons over 24 hours.
The tank rebounded very quickly, much faster than I expected. (As can be seen above). So I stopped the auto water changes - it only changed about 3 gallons of water total before I turned it off.
Alk settled back at 8 - the tank looks good other than some precipitants on the glass that we are scraping off. Today the corals are all happy and open (they have been happy and opened the entire time actually) The fish also deem to be doing just fine.
Two very strange things tho:
1. My ATO is empty, which means it added 5 gallons of RODI water in the past 2 days. I'm not sure how / why this happened. Its way more than we typically use.
2. My MG Fell hard as can be seen in the photo below (MG vs ALK):
And this is where I am stuck - I do not know what is going on?
Why did the ALK rebound back down so quickly?
Why is the MG dropping?
Why did my tank use so much RODI water through the ATO so quickly (I could have goofed up the measurements on my 5 Gal water change a bit, but not enough to run the RODI chamber dry)
Any advice is appreciated, still new to this trying to figure everything out.
Thanks
Yesterday afternoon at at about 1:00 PM I accidentally turned my Apex from "Auto" to "On" and it ran for the next few hours dosing Soda Ash (BlkReefSupply) into the water. I caught the mistake at about 3PM, in that time frame I dosed about 388ML of ALK. The tank spiked from 8.02 to 13.97 (which works out based on the dosing math)
When we got home the tank was slightly cloudy, but not terrible. I verified the Alk with a RedSea test just to ensure everything was working properly. I was getting 14 on the test as well - in other threads we read about not creating a downward spike we did a quick 5 Gallon water change, and changed a second DOS from daily water changes to a manual water change of 20 gallons over 24 hours.
The tank rebounded very quickly, much faster than I expected. (As can be seen above). So I stopped the auto water changes - it only changed about 3 gallons of water total before I turned it off.
Alk settled back at 8 - the tank looks good other than some precipitants on the glass that we are scraping off. Today the corals are all happy and open (they have been happy and opened the entire time actually) The fish also deem to be doing just fine.
Two very strange things tho:
1. My ATO is empty, which means it added 5 gallons of RODI water in the past 2 days. I'm not sure how / why this happened. Its way more than we typically use.
2. My MG Fell hard as can be seen in the photo below (MG vs ALK):
And this is where I am stuck - I do not know what is going on?
Why did the ALK rebound back down so quickly?
Why is the MG dropping?
Why did my tank use so much RODI water through the ATO so quickly (I could have goofed up the measurements on my 5 Gal water change a bit, but not enough to run the RODI chamber dry)
Any advice is appreciated, still new to this trying to figure everything out.
Thanks
