Balancing up my big three.. kh mg and cal.

[Heisenberg 78]

I’ve been struggling for some time now with even the most basic corals.
There are corals in my tank that I’ve had for a good 6month like blastos , frogspawn, which seem ok. I have other simple coral which seem to die like I’m trying to keep the most sensitive sps, these are montipora plate, digitata, acan, and to a degree lime hysteric.

I can’t seem to understand what I’m missing as most reefers keep these without making any fuss over them whatsoever... so what am I doing wrong?

The tank is hooked up to a calcium reactor; but because there are only a few frags in there I barely have a bubble per second running constantly all day which doesn’t take much in achieving dkh of around 8 or 9
My calcium is 385 and my mag is 1340

I do have higher than normal po4 and nitrate which sits stubbornly at 20ppm and 0.16ppm respectively.

I have bio pearls in my reactor which doesn’t seem to be reducing the nutrients but maintains them.

I have two small refugiums at 16 litres volume filled with macro algea it’s a small leaf caulerpa I think.

My water always seems to have lost of particulate matter blowing around and under lighting I seem to get a fine haze which obscures the water clarity.

In my sand (which was in hindsight a bit foolish now) I imported it from a reefers tank breakdown, it was mixed with a bag of new live sand.
Shortly after I was getting a rusty diatom brown patch which has never gone..
I’ve tried phosguard, water changes and it just seems to come back.

Just wondering if you can point me in the right direction as I’m losing faith in ever achieving a healthy tank.

Before I put it out there to you, I ran an experiment, twice actually..

Once in March this year and one last month.

My mag level was always around the 1280 mark and I took the chance of raising it up using some Red Sea powder.. shortly after I noticed some of a red montipora plate start to make a comeback..it was literally brown and barely alive.
Anyway, it stated to brighten up.. I continued with the mag and added iodine and potassium.. gradually it started looking even better..
Then my father passed away so it kind of went on the back burner..

In July August I started it up again, and just like before I got it back again with noticeable change every day.
It then got stung by my bubble tips, so now it’s back to square one again..

Even though this coral come back I had bought a green plating monti to see how this went too. It’s been in a month and now all the green base colouration has almost gone and all that’s left is a creamy skeleton with green polyps..
I have tried these now about 6 times and the same thing happens each time..

Someone please give me some inspiration..

 

[saltyfilmfolks]

Have you gone in a different direction?
I used to not auto dose. Never tested any thing. Sps lps zoas all grew great. Did water changes with natural seawater.
Great results. Even with a broken skimmer.

My reccomendation would be , ignore the big three.

What else is there?

 

[Heisenberg 78]

I’ve always had a cal reactor, I’ve had success with my 1st tank using one but since getting Dino in my last tank it got broken down and started a fresh.

I used to use a ph controller to plummet the ph, that’s the only thing I’m not doing on this reactor..
I’m not sure if it’s cos I’m not dissolving media correctly or what.. I just know that corals don’t like my tank. (Especially monti..)

I don’t do waterchanges religiously maybe 1 a month or so and our sea water in northwest uk isn’t favourable for me.. I don’t live close enough either.

I was initially thinking something was out of sync in alk to cal ratios

 

[chipmunkofdoom2]

How long has the tank been up? Mike Paletta set up a tank a while ago and had nothing but failure for the first year. Once he added some bio-diversity, the tank started picking up. I'm not saying that bio-diversity is the answer, but there's nothing really wrong with your parameters. I think something else is going on.

One other question, what kind of lighting are you running? It's possible you're giving your corals too much light, or not the right type of light.

 

[Joe Grubbs]

You may consider running a Triton ICP test.

With my first test, I found that my trace elements were very low (~0) while the big 3 were fine. I have chosen to use the Red Sea 4 part trace dosing (as it is tied to Ca dose), after getting the tank closer to 'normal sea water' this 4 part along with keeping Ca,Mg,Alk in check has been an easy solution for me...over the past 4 months there's been a nice response in coral color and growth.

 

[Heisenberg 78]

How long has the tank been up? Mike Paletta set up a tank a while ago and had nothing but failure for the first year. Once he added some bio-diversity, the tank started picking up. I'm not saying that bio-diversity is the answer, but there's nothing really wrong with your parameters. I think something else is going on.

One other question, what kind of lighting are you running? It's possible you're giving your corals too much light, or not the right type of light.

Hi the tank has been running two years in January so now very mature.

I use two radion g3 xr15 and 1 xr30 (so 4 pucks) on a Red Sea
reefer 350

I start with blues for an hour or two then blends to a 12k spectrum then finish with an hour and a half of blues. Start of day 1300 and off at 2230 70% intensity

Do you refer to bottled bacteria and pod life when you say biodiversity?

Thanks

 

[cracker]

Where can one obtain this/ find Biodiversity ?

 

[Bergs]

do you have a flame angel in the tank?

 

[Bergs]

do you have a flame angel in the tank?

 

[Bergs]

Do you have a flame angel in the tank or other fish that might be nipping at those corals?

 

[Heisenberg 78]

.

 

[Heisenberg 78]

I have a coral beauty and a potters angel but I’m sure that they are not nippers.
I spend a fair bit of time around the tank and have never seen them even look at anything so I’d be fairly confident to eliminate them.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

The current values seem fine to me, but raising the calcium a bit with a couple of days of manual dosing of calcium chloride to 420 ppm would be a good plan. Then just watch them again over time.

 

[Heisenberg 78]

The current values seem fine to me, but raising the calcium a bit with a couple of days of manual dosing of calcium chloride to 420 ppm would be a good plan. Then just watch them again over time.

Thanks for clearing that up, I did actually think as much, because my corals last time took off very quick and gave me no trouble at all.

I bought some calc chloride and I’m going to gradually elevate my numbers.
The calc reactor is off at the moment so I’ll dose kalk and mag to see where I end up.
Once I get a probe in place I’ll get it set up like I had it before.

Thanks again for everyone’s help.