Bleaching need more light?

[Hydrored]

You need a new LFS, stop going there as they have no clue. Slowly increase your salinity, where the algae is growing on the tips the tissue is dead. Find somebody to take the SPS so it has a chance

 

[Miami Reef]

Alkalinity is the most important thing to test. Especially with sps. What is your alkalinity?

 

[woodyetia]

You also should raise your nitrates too IMO. If it were me I'd just buy a more appropriate light for your tank instead of just adding another one of them. Even a few black box lights would be better than what you're using.

Your corals definitely aren't doing well. The algea growing on the skeleton is never a good sign.

I’ve always been told to shoot for 0 on those 3 levels. I will work on raising my salinity slowly and get my temp lower.

I’ll keep an eye for some lights is there a reason not to add another same light to get double the lighting just to keep everything uniform plus it was a $200 light lol.

fish are all doing great and forgot I have about 60lbs live rock and another 45 lbs live sand. have had no issues keeping numbers at 0, I do my own test and have LFS do one whenever I go in.

Again thank you all I have had fish in the past but this is my first time with corals besides mushrooms.

@MaxTremors by tank deminsions are 3 feet long by 18 inches wide by 2 feet deep 65 gallons. TY

 

[MaxTremors]

I’ve always been told to shoot for 0 on those 3 levels. I will work on raising my salinity slowly and get my temp lower.

I’ll keep an eye for some lights is there a reason not to add another same light to get double the lighting just to keep everything uniform plus it was a $200 light lol.

fish are all doing great and forgot I have about 60lbs live rock and another 45 lbs live sand. have had no issues keeping numbers at 0, I do my own test and have LFS do one whenever I go in.

Again thank you all I have had fish in the past but this is my first time with corals besides mushrooms.

@MaxTremors by tank deminsions are 3 feet long by 18 inches wide by 2 feet deep 65 gallons. TY

There are a few ways you could go with the lighting, if it were my tank I’d probably go with either two AI Prime 16HDs or 2 Kessil A160s. I think between the the two, the AI Primes are able to grow with you better, are more versatile, and are a little less expensive (they’re both around $240 a piece, plus mounting equipment, but with the Kessils you’ll also have to buy the controller, with the AI Primes it’s built in). Getting two of either of these lights will allow you to keep most soft corals, LPS, and some SPS, and if you really get into SPS down the road you can always add another light or two (ie you won’t have to buy all new fixtures, you’ll be able to just add to what you have).

The reason I don’t recommend just adding a second of the light you already have is that even two of them would still be pretty underpowered, and the spectrum isn’t great (the corals you’d be able to keep with these lights will lose their color). The light you have is 32 watts, but the LEDs it uses aren’t very powerful (each is less than 1 watt), so it’s not pushing that much PAR, especially at two feet deep. The AI Prime, for example, 54 watts (that’s with all channels at 100%), but even if you ran it at 32 watts of power, the light penetration would be much better because the LEDs are much more powerful, the lens are better, and the blue end of the spectrum is much broader. The other cool thing about the primes is that you can overdrive certain channels if you’re not using full power on other channels (so for example if you run the whites at 50%, you can overdrive the other channels to 110%).

As far as your nitrates and phosphates, corals need a little bit of these to live and grow. In a fish only system, having them at zero is fine (though you do run the risk of getting dinoflagellates). Ideally, for a mixed reef, I’d try to keep my nitrates between 5-10ppm and phosphate between 0.03 and 0.05ppm. Also, running your tank at 80-80.5 is completely fine. I recommend 78, just so you have some leeway in either direction should your heater or AC fail, but 80 won’t hurt anything.

 

[minus9]

You can buy all of these books on Amazon and other places for next to nothing and they are worth their weight in gold. I know that we’ve come a long way in reef keeping, but the fundamentals are still the same, that these books hold their value to this day.
Great books to read