Crazy Ammonia spike

[Betex]

Have you done an actual ammonia test on your ro/di water? Maybe a chloramine contamination... that’ll give positive ammonia readings.

My city uses chloramines so I run sediment filter followed by x2 chloramine blocks, membrane through x3 di resin. Tds 0 and I have tested using strips for chloramine/chlorine and it’s clear, verified strips were good against my tap which clearly changed the colors on strip with chloramine present.

I also did test rodi and ATI ICP also tests rodi water

 

[brandon429]

You have extremely good backup support for this tank B

it really is an impressive reef. I was heartbroken I couldn’t find any help for Jon here, a similar sps issue. I simply cannot find what’s wrong with the sps, this wouldn’t be an upper echelon hobby were it any easier.

Dead coral over night

Yesterday this coral looked good. Temp 80 Salinity 1.026 ALK 9 Cal 459 Mag 1440 No3 20ppm Po4 0.46 150 gallons total

www.reef2reef.com

he uses seneye ammonia, we got lucky on that part. It helped to rule out causatives but we never ruled in any replacements either. The standout clues are a very close match to your tank, notably the fish health, clear water, no smell, open corals not affected and no input source known, or smelling

 

[Betex]

Just did 25g water change so a bit shy of 50% gonna let things right out through the night and see if more will be needed tomorrow.

 

[brandon429]

Good job in my opinion thats enough since we want stability for the remaining sps

that water change exports some of the additives nicely and will help to keep things clean and not a soup


agreed just calmer low light rehab


there can’t be any sort of blending of options for remedy, you’ll have to choose which set you prefer


the set of options that involves believing this one reef lost it’s filter bacteria is going to require opposite fixes vs the set of options that claims nh3 was never the culprit. Sorry it’s so dang hard but that reef is going to be ok with all other animals that’s for sure, it’s a hardcore sps-specific challenge

 

[Betex]

Just checked ammonia to see how it was looking and it’s finally registering below 2 on Red Sea test kit where before it was darker than the card went up to.

Thinking another 25g water change tomorrow to bring this down further

No fish death or any inverts still just affecting SPS water this event is. Same one that was peeling before still looking meh and one other not so hot right now.

 

[brandon429]

Well done, the water changes are safe guiding. Your system was very clean I noticed from the video, so input water wasn’t expected to cast up a bunch of pent up waste.

it would be different if the tank had advanced aging, invasions, total blanketing of rocks and sand by waste but its opposite of that


so the water changes don’t stir up detritus in your tank, the action of adding back doesnt kick up clouding.

if the tank was in bad shape we’d have to disassembly clean it all at once in order to extract all the waste so we could do the careful water changes, you’re on the right track. Dropping t5’s helped a few days agreed and then back on short period ramping back

 

[Betex]

As of this morning

-GSP started to open back up
-No fish or invert death
-corals that were peeling stopped and didnt fully peel out like the 3 previous ones
-Goni still a bit confused but more open than before
-Tests still showing ammonia in water but lower levels than before.

Will be doing another 25g change today.

After thinking and thinking what could have caused this the one thing that I did add to the system is podyourreef's live phyto which I have always done but within the last month instead of the usual strain I tried their rhodomonas live phyto. I am now doing an ammonia test on that phyto to see if this was the culprit but with 10min left I can already see the ammonia on the test is positive. This bottle is less than a month old and it is refrigerated and mixed daily so I am very curious about this.

 

[brandon429]

your tank can handle direct input of liquid ammonia though, so some from phyto would smell and you wouldn't have added any, and if you did, its eaten up in five minutes

see the thread in the chemistry forum where twenty tanks add it for boosted nitrogen, and it smells.

note they track the additions on seneye, digital testing that does not misread.

*phyto systems are not nitrogen converting systems they're nitrogen uptaking ones, if it blanks zero on that sample again this is not reef water.

no matter the test reports, the tests don't get any more accurate than how they caused the initial concern, its important for cyclers to know that inputting direct ammonia into a reef is decades established and it eats up the ammonia right away.

this aquarium never had ammonia leave from the thousandths, or that fine torch would be closed. the snail, dead.

glad its turning around you stuck this out well!

the cause of your thread is an ammonia misread. no other causative. google agrees x 15000

 

[Betex]

your tank can handle direct input of liquid ammonia though, so some from phyto would smell and you wouldn't have added any, and if you did, its eaten up in five minutes

see the thread in the chemistry forum where twenty tanks add it for boosted nitrogen, and it smells.

Pod your reefs phyto never smells great so I wouldn't have thought anything of it. and seeing how dark the ammonia test is becoming I can only assume injecting 10ml of this might have had some affect.

 

[brandon429]

the #1 thing your thread contributes to reefing is the solid, absolutely non variable condition of nh3 in a post-cycle reefs with happy, healthy animals. It shows the doubt that old cycling science brings, the impacts of test reading.

I know years after this thread is fixed up you'll still believe it was the kit, and so will 99% of readers of this thread and that's no problem at all, we have literally been told an ammonia spike without cause is possible by the best in reefing.

It will take me years and years and years to undo that mis teaching. those rascals



in the end Im glad your system is ok I still do not know about those sps

the light dropping helped tremendously, nice reaction time for you there.

 

[Betex]

the #1 thing your thread contributes to reefing is the solid, absolutely non variable condition of nh3 in a post-cycle reefs with happy, healthy animals. It shows the doubt that old cycling science brings, the impacts of test reading.

I know years after this thread is fixed up you'll still believe it was the kit, and so will 99% of readers of this thread and that's no problem at all, we have literally been told an ammonia spike without cause is possible by the best in reefing.

It will take me years and years and years to undo that mis teaching. those rascals



in the end Im glad your system is ok I still do not know about those sps

the light dropping helped tremendously, nice reaction time for you there.

After doing the test just in case on the phyto its come back well over 2 my guess is between 2-3 which just so happens is what I had in my tank. So assuming I added 10ml of this to my tank at least x2-3 a week can one assume this might have had some implication on all this.

I mean still cant explain the free ammonia not being there as I would have expect no fish to survive 3+ days at anything over 1.

 

[brandon429]

I'm glad you found something smelly no harm in gaining new phyto ! Where smell goes...

 

[brandon429]

High ammonia

That’s perfect. We need to be able to demonstrate what it reads against what we know post-cycle reefs run at, always. If it’s not zero still it will help to see, it will help benchmark the test kit for accuracy

www.reef2reef.com

B


we just closed that false read out, look how long that tank has been up and the strong convincing it took

his final pic is of a .5-1.0 ppm reading which he has now learned to live with, it is an overreport just the same.

we had to really really really work to earn that closure.

your ammonia levels and his, and mine which have never been tested in 16 years are the same.

if we were all using seneye calibrated and tuned that would be apparent. hope that helps along with your removal of the stinky phyto ha nice.

I bet your corals will tune back up just fine given a little time and tlc

 

[Betex]

Last ammonia test prior to water change was showing .8, I also had poly filter laying around that I added to sump and hoping to alleviate.

Just finished 25g water change.

 

[brandon429]

If it strips nitrate too though, coral harm is possible. This is the risk with random fixes unmatched, like bottle bac vs 02 and chemical soup from dieoff of mass dosed bacteria with no where to attach or various additives


I'll let you take over from here on out. Excellent thread, this will help many.

This is the most personally impactful misread thread I've seen in years I know it caused tremendous stress. You handled it better than 99% would that's for sure.

 

[Betex]

If it strips nitrate too though, coral harm is possible. This is the risk with random fixes unmatched, like bottle bac vs 02 and chemical soup from dieoff of mass dosed bacteria with no where to attach or various additives


I'll let you take over from here on out. Excellent thread, this will help many.

This is the most personally impactful misread thread I've seen in years I know it caused tremendous stress. You handled it better than 99% would that's for sure.

I've been checking no3/po4 and have neophos/neonitro if I need to bump them up plus I feed heavy

 

[brandon429]

Pls B can we get a picture of your current ammonia reading


there has been a mass rash breakout of ammonia alert posts we needed some closure here, the actual test pic pls we want to be able to see the color for ourselves

also important to know no other deaths have happened other than sps potentially?

 

[brandon429]

seven pages of proud ammonia dosers right into full reefs, but silence when api or Red Sea posts a disagreement on the last page

Does anyone dose ammonia and/or how would one try?

So, after an interesting discussion on nitrate dosing and looking at my Walt Disney coral and seeing it slightly less colorful than I have seen it in others tanks, I have decided I want to learn about and then try dosing ammonia instead of buying 20 damsels. Nitrate additives I see abound and...

www.reef2reef.com

@blasterman


interested in your take after reading here. You’ve slogged ammonia reads in forums ten years now alongside the rest of us


have we found the first outlier 1.5 years past cycle unable to control free ammonia without using mb7

can a single point titration reading ever be wrong or adulterated

 

[Betex]

Pls B can we get a picture of your current ammonia reading


there has been a mass rash breakout of ammonia alert posts we needed some closure here, the actual test pic pls we want to be able to see the color for ourselves

also important to know no other deaths have happened other than sps potentially?

Hey Brandon,

after that last water change and I let it be I dosed some MB7 daily which I usually use after water changes anyhow and checked after a couple of days and I was sitting at 0 so everything has cleared out. Thankfully no more deaths from this. Total loss was a cleaner shrimp, some inverts, 6 sps, indo gold torch bleached. Had some loose quiet a bit of color and others started to peel but stopped entirely once I got it under control and seem to be all back to normal.

I also had light running much lower than usual and shut off the t5s for a week. Now back to normal schedule.

 

[brandon429]

Can we see the test kit readout pls, the actual kit and the comparison card as a pic vs reported numbers

we are collecting Red Sea ammonia pictures on known cycled tanks in another thread


Take close up / bright light so we have that reference

the mb7 played no role here, the tank was already full of bacteria, it’s why fish lived through all the dosings / offsets and the other corals were fine.


- We can see in the link above reef tanks uptake straight ammonia rapidly. no reasons listed yours couldn’t participate.


we will never know if posted picture readings are taken from reef tanks or just distilled water and reported as reef tank water... but as we collect enough patterns in our ammonia picture thread the trends will keep the truth running on how these color tests report for the masses. Need your ammonia pic if possible to close out, I wish we’d got a starting one as well to compare with but I forgot to ask for it three pages back.