Back in again. 75g sps build thread

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DesertReefT4r

DesertReefT4r

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Water tests with all my kits.
Temp 78.9
Ph 7.9
Salinity 1.025
Alk 8.3 Hanna, 8.4 Red Sea, 8-9 API
Calc 400 Red Sea, 420 API
Mag 1400 Red Sea
No3 less than 0.25 Red Sea but not 0.00, 0 API
Po4 0.04 Hanna, 0.04 Red Sea, 0 API
Some pics of the corals that are on decline or pale.

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DesertReefT4r

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Lost the acro in pic 5 yesturday, it was a piece of the large wild acro I got. Both pieces of it were doing really well, holding color and growing. That is until all this started to happen. Cyano and diatoms are still going pretty crazy. Part of the issue I am thinking is bacterial maybe a bacteria crash of some kind. Also wondering if with my low nutrients and increasing the alk from 7.7-7.9 up to my current 8.3-8.5 might be causing issues. I may slowly let it come down to 7.9 again.
 
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Well the coral death has stopped it seems. Corals are looking less pale. Cyano and diatoms are still an issue. I am 24 hrs into a Chemi Clean treatment, forgot to empty and lower the skimmer water level. So yeah it overflowed into the sump, went crazy for about 2 hours before settling down some. I am set on getting the tank back on track. Not going to mess to with anything after the cyano is dealt with.
 
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Treating the tank with cheami clean. Forgot to empty and turn down the skimmer so it overflowed into the sump. Looks like I will need to do another dose. I hate having to do so much to my tank right now. I really just want to leave it be but I need to deal with the cyano and the treatment requires a 20% water change and I will need to another 20% when I treat again.
I went to the LFS to ask some questions in hopes to gain some insight into what is going on with my tank and pick up the Chemi Clean. Told them about my salinity drop, shared my ICP test and my test results and how I run the tank and its setup and the issues I am having. Sadly not much info that was helpful to me. They said my cal at 410 ppm is low and to raise it to 450 and that cal is key in coral color. I try to target 420 ppm and IME 400-420 ppm is the ideal range. They wanted to know why I am trying to increase no3 and I explained the need of no3 and po4 to corals. They did not take that too well and where kind of like "what, why would you want 1-5 ppm no3". So they basically backed up the idea that the salinity drop is the cause of the mini crash, to raise my cal to 450 I dont agree, deal with the cyano which I already knew, slow down on water changes for the diatoms which I already am trying to do but chemi clean..., just keep everything stable and leave it alone no big changes and that it looks like I am good at keeping stability and am doing everything right. So yeah my LFS is not much help and I have more experience then they seem too. Same thing goes for the 3 other LFS in my area, all the really good ones closed down years ago. Having a LFS or local advanced hobbiest to go to for help is really priceless. Thank the reef gods we have the R2R community.
 

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Sounds like your at a low point right now. It will get better.
I never used chemi clean before, so can't help you there.
I think your problem is nutrient related. Tank is acting like it's new. I say this because when you add fish your getting diatoms.
I would slowly increase fish load and let bacteria and nutrients build up.
Maybe try adding some bacteria like Microbacter 7 or Biodigest .
I think we may live near each other.
I'm in Goodyear Arizona.
 
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Sounds like your at a low point right now. It will get better.
I never used chemi clean before, so can't help you there.
I think your problem is nutrient related. Tank is acting like it's new. I say this because when you add fish your getting diatoms.
I would slowly increase fish load and let bacteria and nutrients build up.
Maybe try adding some bacteria like Microbacter 7 or Biodigest .
I think we may live near each other.
I'm in Goodyear Arizona.
I do dose MB7. Water test today before a 20% water change was no3 about 0.05 ppm and po4 0.06 ppm. Tank is a year old but yeah its acting like new tank uglies. I live in east Mesa so a little ways from you.
 

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I do dose MB7. Water test today before a 20% water change was no3 about 0.05 ppm and po4 0.06 ppm. Tank is a year old but yeah its acting like new tank uglies. I live in east Mesa so a little ways from you.

I cut back on dosing MB7. I was dosing twice a week, no negative side effects, just didn’t know if I needed to or not? Anyway, my tank reboot has been low nutrient, and I thought maybe adding too much mb7 could be driving it low as well (along with my other export methods). Try cutting back or dosing less?

Also, how often are you doing WC? With nutrient levels that low, are you sure you want to do a 20% WC? I’ve cut back to once a month. Now my NO3 hovers around 0.5 ppm and PO4 is always between 0.03-0.10 on salifert. No paling in my tank, but I have a ton of fish and feed 4-5x/day. A lot.
 

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Take a breath dude, you are right, stop chasing numbers, i know you are not, let it settle, less interactions be it water changes or dosing, there has to be a core issue we are missing?
 

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I've had a few mini crashes on my old tank and even a very large one. I've personally been on the side of trying to solve the issues without chemical additives. After my worst tank crash (hurricane Florence took out power for 14 days) I had a ton of diatoms, cyano; it looked super scary after that. I was able to get everything on the mend without additives and just keeping to the usual schedule without a 100% water change or anything like that.

The most important things I think I've found for dealing with these is bullet listed here; hopefully it helps.
  • Ensure you have very healthy chaeto & refugium with plenty of light and water flow. These should out compete pretty much everything except your corals and fish.
  • Very healthy high quality live rock is a huge benefit -> buy a good 5+ pound premium rock (the stuff thats like $15/lb). Stick it in your refugium; it should come with good critters. My running theory is that the baseline ecosystem that comes with these rocks greatly helps the overall health and spreads throughout the aquarium.
  • Maybe bump the waterflow on your display tank and put some filter socks on for a while (if you don't already). It tends to prefer slower areas of the tank and if it detaches, you can catch it in your socks and clean those out instead of it recirculating in your system.
  • Consider Natural Eaters & Things that disturb it. Sandfighting conchs or any other sifter for the sand, sea urchins are great; they get everywhere, eat pretty much anything like this and disrupt a bunch of stuff you don't usually like (they do eat corraline; but ive found in a good tank the corraline grows faster than a small urchin can eat it), emerald crabs can sometimes get rid of it.
  • I think I read you are using RO/DI water; keep that up for sure
  • Use more natural foods such as frozen mysis or brine shrimp (even live ones) - shoot I even blasted my whole tank with that stuff and way over-fed; my tank compensated by having amazing chaeto growth and more pods than I could handle; so I tend to add a few more hungry fish to help balance it all out which produced more detritus; but the base ecosystem had brittle stars and bristle worms and all sorts of stuff that loved to eat that stuff and the flow was pretty high on the tank.
  • Much of the flow of my healthier tanks seems to come from the movement of water from display to sump and back, the additional heads are just to ensure the whole tank can get movement and produce detritus lift.

I don't know if any of that is helpful; but doing those things has been working for me; your experience may differ.
 
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I cut back on dosing MB7. I was dosing twice a week, no negative side effects, just didn’t know if I needed to or not? Anyway, my tank reboot has been low nutrient, and I thought maybe adding too much mb7 could be driving it low as well (along with my other export methods). Try cutting back or dosing less?
Also, how often are you doing WC? With nutrient levels that low, are you sure you want to do a 20% WC? I’ve cut back to once a month. Now my NO3 hovers around 0.5 ppm and PO4 is always between 0.03-0.10 on salifert. No paling in my tank, but I have a ton of fish and feed 4-5x/day. A lot.
I am only dosing 5ml of MB7 once a week. I was out for a few weeks so dosing was stopped for that time period. I am tryingnot to do water changes, only when needed for trace elements, nutrient reduction or algae/cyano removeal. So water changes are not very regular. When I do a water change its normally 10 gallons and about every 3 weeks to once a month. I did just do a 20% 12-15g water change on sunday for the chemi clean treatment. Not planning to do a water change for a while. I have kinf of gotten to a point where I let my tank and water tests tell if a water change is needed. I also feel like I feed my fish pretty well, 3-4 times a day.
Take a breath dude, you are right, stop chasing numbers, i know you are not, let it settle, less interactions be it water changes or dosing, there has to be a core issue we are missing?
Yeah, Im with you. My plan exactly, just let it be and settle down. What are we missing here? Good question.
I've had a few mini crashes on my old tank and even a very large one. I've personally been on the side of trying to solve the issues without chemical additives. After my worst tank crash (hurricane Florence took out power for 14 days) I had a ton of diatoms, cyano; it looked super scary after that. I was able to get everything on the mend without additives and just keeping to the usual schedule without a 100% water change or anything like that.

The most important things I think I've found for dealing with these is bullet listed here; hopefully it helps.
  • Ensure you have very healthy chaeto & refugium with plenty of light and water flow. These should out compete pretty much everything except your corals and fish.
  • Very healthy high quality live rock is a huge benefit -> buy a good 5+ pound premium rock (the stuff thats like $15/lb). Stick it in your refugium; it should come with good critters. My running theory is that the baseline ecosystem that comes with these rocks greatly helps the overall health and spreads throughout the aquarium.
  • Maybe bump the waterflow on your display tank and put some filter socks on for a while (if you don't already). It tends to prefer slower areas of the tank and if it detaches, you can catch it in your socks and clean those out instead of it recirculating in your system.
  • Consider Natural Eaters & Things that disturb it. Sandfighting conchs or any other sifter for the sand, sea urchins are great; they get everywhere, eat pretty much anything like this and disrupt a bunch of stuff you don't usually like (they do eat corraline; but ive found in a good tank the corraline grows faster than a small urchin can eat it), emerald crabs can sometimes get rid of it.
  • I think I read you are using RO/DI water; keep that up for sure
  • Use more natural foods such as frozen mysis or brine shrimp (even live ones) - shoot I even blasted my whole tank with that stuff and way over-fed; my tank compensated by having amazing chaeto growth and more pods than I could handle; so I tend to add a few more hungry fish to help balance it all out which produced more detritus; but the base ecosystem had brittle stars and bristle worms and all sorts of stuff that loved to eat that stuff and the flow was pretty high on the tank.
  • Much of the flow of my healthier tanks seems to come from the movement of water from display to sump and back, the additional heads are just to ensure the whole tank can get movement and produce detritus lift.

I don't know if any of that is helpful; but doing those things has been working for me; your experience may differ.
Thank for the info for sure any help is useful and appreciated. Most of that for me atnleast is basic info, been a sps nut for a good while now and had more than a few reefs. I removed my chaeto and took the fuge ,which was small, off line because it was stripping all the nutrients and iron from the water. Sadly live rock, real live rock is basically non existent these days. I did get some very clean used live rock from a tank break down, cycled the rock and tank very slowly over a few months. Flow is pretty good and very random, 2x PP-8 on 100% Random mode, blowns the sand around some. I have a conch, and some snails that work on the sand but in the mini crash my snail pop took a hit, getting more soon waiting for things to settle. Yep using 0 tds RODI that I make at home, I never let my water get over 2 ppm, 1 and done. I feed a mix of frozen, pellet and flake.
 

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yeah; I live at the beach; my plan is to put a bunch of live rock in one of my crab pods and sink it for 2 months and then drop that into the tank; Last time, I was fortunate that my LFS stocked really high end rocks.
 
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Update on how the reef is recovering. Diatoms are all but gone. Im still fighting cyano and will need to do another Chemi Clean dose. Getting some green slime algae now. Corals are slowly recovering, some are showing growth and others are getting some color back. No water changes since mynlasr Chemi Clean dose. Really wish i woukd have done BB, hating my sand. Slow process but thats how it goes with sps.
 
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Time for an update! The Reef is doing much better I am happy to report. All sps corals that survived the mini crash are looking much better, showing some new growth ane slowly getting color back again. Cyano is still an issue, I should treat with Chemi Clean again but I want to see if it will burn itself out naturally p,us I have not wanted to do a water change more on that i. A min. Reef Roids is for sure fueling my cyano issues. I fed the corals and the next morning cyano was way worse, it was slowing down the last few days before hand. I have not done a water change since 6-30-19 so just over a month now. No3 has been at 0.00 and p04 between 0.07 and 0.04 and thus my reason for not wanting to do any water changes. Alk demand has increased supporting the visual coral growth, down to 7.4 with my target being 8.0. I still cant get my cal to 440-450 due to sps growth and I dont want to increase it too fast so it been slow increases in cal dosing, but stable at 410. Last thing and the only thing I have changed is a slow increase in light duration. I have been increasing by 15 min every week for the last month to slowlynwork up to 10 hours total lights on. Hey how about some pics!? Ok.

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A worm with high fashion and practical utility: Have you ever kept feather dusters in your reef aquarium?

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