Do I have copper in my tank?

[BradB]

I recently posted another thread where I mysteriously lost all my coral in a heavily stocked 270 gallon SPS tank. But I thought I start a separate thread not only about if copper could be to blame, but how to troubleshoot and deal with copper in general.

Copper is NOT something I test for regularly, and I don't even own a kit. Even now that I have a hunch it could be in the tank, I purchased a Triton professional test everything mail in, instead of a copper specific test. Are hobbyist tests even sensitive enough to be useful in a reef tank?

I continuously run cooprisorb in 100ml bags - Is that a good idea? How often should we change it? Can we mix it with GFO? I figured it is cheap, can't hurt, and might help with a disaster.

On a hunch, I pulled my oldest bag of cooprisorb, I usually run 2, and replace 1 at a time. I cut it open to look for the "deep blue-black color" advertised to indicate copper. The cooprisorb looked mostly new, but did have slight dark bluish greenish discoloration in part. Is that copper? Is it enough to wipe out a reef tank? It could also be algae or some sort of bacteria. I put a new cooprisorb bag in to replace the one I cut.

My water cleared enough to see the tank over a week ago, but the zooanthids and clove polyps that did survive haven't opened polyps and seems to be shrinking and bleaching. My lights aren't on yet, but the clove polyps look a lot better and are even partially open. This could be coincidence, but it could be cooprisorb.

I do have "strombus grazer" snails in my tank. While nearly every other invertebrate is dead (including a few aiptasia in my overflow), the snails seem unaffected. It is possible there are fewer now, but there are still plenty, and they look healthy.

 

[Crabs McJones]

What are your parameters? Ammonia nitrite nitrate alkalinity calcium and magnesium. are you using ro/di water?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

You cannot usefully verify that copper is not a problem with a kit, but if you detect any it is too much. I would consider an icp test by one of the better companies if you are concerned, and cuprisirb or metazorb or a polyfilter are good choices. It is hard judge colors of the binders, but more folks have experience doing that with the polyfilter.

 

[Dkeller_nc]

Read your other thread, and let me first offer my sympathies. It's pretty hard to explain to someone that's not in the hobby how a tank wipe-out feels, especially if you don't know the cause.

As Randy noted in the first thread, the first go-to would be the introduction of something en masse to the tank, such as a vodka/vinegar overdose. However, since you've noted that you live alone and have no reason to suspect that something was added to the tank by an errant party guest or small child thinking that "the fish are thirsty", I'd encourage going through absolutely every piece of equipment.

There have been reports on the forum before of someone's heater cracking/overheating that caused a tank wipeout, as well as equipment items that were supposed to be corrosion-proof that weren't (such as cracked magnet coatings).

 

[BradB]

What are your parameters? Ammonia nitrite nitrate alkalinity calcium and magnesium. are you using ro/di water?

I might test tomorrow, but this is probably useless. I know massive die off spiked ammonia>nitrite>nitrate. I know Calclium and Alk went way up as I kept dosing but nothing was using it, and is now low as I stopped dosing.

I am using RO water.

 

[BradB]

Read your other thread, and let me first offer my sympathies. It's pretty hard to explain to someone that's not in the hobby how a tank wipe-out feels, especially if you don't know the cause.

As Randy noted in the first thread, the first go-to would be the introduction of something en masse to the tank, such as a vodka/vinegar overdose. However, since you've noted that you live alone and have no reason to suspect that something was added to the tank by an errant party guest or small child thinking that "the fish are thirsty", I'd encourage going through absolutely every piece of equipment.

There have been reports on the forum before of someone's heater cracking/overheating that caused a tank wipeout, as well as equipment items that were supposed to be corrosion-proof that weren't (such as cracked magnet coatings).

Thanks. I really appreciate it. I've posted several threads on several forums, and while people commented, it has been underwhelming. If I read that someone else's tank was wiped out by a mysterious cause, that would be enough to cause me to panic. But I wouldn't necessarily commented unless I could say something useful.

This is the first non-equipment related wipe out for me, and probably one of the only ones I've heard of. None of the equipment has obvious problems. I have thoroughly been inspecting equipment for hidden issues or problems, but so far found nothing, but am not done yet.

 

[Dkeller_nc]

One suggestion I might offer with respect to the equipment examination is to consider stripping everything off of the tank including the powerheads, skimmer, heater(s), return pump(s) and lighting, and then carefully re-installing each and every piece one by one. The downside to doing this is that it might consume an entire Saturday since you're starting from a glass box of water with no lifesupport.

But it's sometimes helpful to do something like this systematically. I did exactly this when I had a problem with my 20g nano - corals would die for no reason, and they were corals that I'd had for years and years (this nano has been running since 2004). I spent weeks looking at every piece of equipment on a piecemeal basis, and couldn't find anything.

After stripping the tank of all equipment one Saturday and painstakingly chemically cleaning everything with dilute HCl, examining it and then reinstalling it, I found the issue - there was a hairline crack in the heater that was allowing tank water in when the heater was off, then expelling it when the heater was on. So the effect was a near-continuous injection of very small amounts of copper, and that hairline crack was invisible under the growth on the heater.

 

[W1ngz]

I hope the ICP test you're waiting on provides you some answers. If copper is part of the problem that may be the only way to find out.

I say part of the problem, because a sudden total wipe out, to me anyway, doesn't sound like it's going to have a single cause to be pinpointed. Copper wouldn't likely cause the huge bacterial bloom of the magnitude described in your other thread, since at the time it started you didn't immediately see a lot of dead animals in the tank. A bacterial bloom that bad, and that long I'd think would take a very visible number of dead things in the tank before the water became opaque.

This may have been a completely inadvertent addition of something. Accidents happen, maybe your RO reservoir was contaminated with something weeks before the onset of the bacterial bloom. Maybe there was something on your hands. Maybe you absentmindedly poured some vinegar into the topoff water after cleaning a powerhead.

The list of maybes could be really long, and doesn't make the situation suck any less. Point is I don't think there was only one trigger involved in this.

 

[BradB]

One suggestion I might offer with respect to the equipment examination is to consider stripping everything off of the tank including the powerheads, skimmer, heater(s), return pump(s) and lighting, and then carefully re-installing each and every piece one by one. The downside to doing this is that it might consume an entire Saturday since you're starting from a glass box of water with no lifesupport.

But it's sometimes helpful to do something like this systematically. I did exactly this when I had a problem with my 20g nano - corals would die for no reason, and they were corals that I'd had for years and years (this nano has been running since 2004). I spent weeks looking at every piece of equipment on a piecemeal basis, and couldn't find anything.

After stripping the tank of all equipment one Saturday and painstakingly chemically cleaning everything with dilute HCl, examining it and then reinstalling it, I found the issue - there was a hairline crack in the heater that was allowing tank water in when the heater was off, then expelling it when the heater was on. So the effect was a near-continuous injection of very small amounts of copper, and that hairline crack was invisible under the growth on the heater.

This will work with heaters and power heads, and is pretty much what I am doing, except I am not stripping everything at once. I've been putting stuff in muriatic acid, gives it a good cleaning, and I assume any small crack or leak will let the acid in and make the problem obvious. But large things, like the skimmer and return, are plumbed in and I don't see the point cutting PVC to remove them, at least not yet.

 

[mfinn]

I recently posted another thread where I mysteriously lost all my coral in a heavily stocked 270 gallon SPS tank. But I thought I start a separate thread not only about if copper could be to blame, but how to troubleshoot and deal with copper in general.

Copper is NOT something I test for regularly, and I don't even own a kit. Even now that I have a hunch it could be in the tank, I purchased a Triton professional test everything mail in, instead of a copper specific test. Are hobbyist tests even sensitive enough to be useful in a reef tank?

I continuously run cooprisorb in 100ml bags - Is that a good idea? How often should we change it? Can we mix it with GFO? I figured it is cheap, can't hurt, and might help with a disaster.

On a hunch, I pulled my oldest bag of cooprisorb, I usually run 2, and replace 1 at a time. I cut it open to look for the "deep blue-black color" advertised to indicate copper. The cooprisorb looked mostly new, but did have slight dark bluish greenish discoloration in part. Is that copper? Is it enough to wipe out a reef tank? It could also be algae or some sort of bacteria. I put a new cooprisorb bag in to replace the one I cut.

My water cleared enough to see the tank over a week ago, but the zooanthids and clove polyps that did survive haven't opened polyps and seems to be shrinking and bleaching. My lights aren't on yet, but the clove polyps look a lot better and are even partially open. This could be coincidence, but it could be cooprisorb.

I do have "strombus grazer" snails in my tank. While nearly every other invertebrate is dead (including a few aiptasia in my overflow), the snails seem unaffected. It is possible there are fewer now, but there are still plenty, and they look healthy.

Did you add copper?

 

[BradB]

I hope the ICP test you're waiting on provides you some answers. If copper is part of the problem that may be the only way to find out.

I say part of the problem, because a sudden total wipe out, to me anyway, doesn't sound like it's going to have a single cause to be pinpointed. Copper wouldn't likely cause the huge bacterial bloom of the magnitude described in your other thread, since at the time it started you didn't immediately see a lot of dead animals in the tank. A bacterial bloom that bad, and that long I'd think would take a very visible number of dead things in the tank before the water became opaque.

This may have been a completely inadvertent addition of something. Accidents happen, maybe your RO reservoir was contaminated with something weeks before the onset of the bacterial bloom. Maybe there was something on your hands. Maybe you absentmindedly poured some vinegar into the topoff water after cleaning a powerhead.

The list of maybes could be really long, and doesn't make the situation suck any less. Point is I don't think there was only one trigger involved in this.

Contaminated salt is a possibility I can't rule out. But I opened the box of salt and was using it almost a month before. So one of the 4 bags could have been contaminated but not all.

As for multiple causes, it seems unlikely. I could have had some sort of untestable water quality issue for a long time, and when something like a failed heater killed my coral, it fueled a massive amount of bacteria.

I will learn a lot from my clove polyps in the next few days. If they recover completely, the problem is likely gone. If they die, the problem is likely ongoing.

 

[BradB]

Did you add copper?

Obviously not on purpose. I have copper wire in the lights, heaters and power heads. Adding cooprisorb either made things better, or the timing was coincidental.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Obviously not on purpose. I have copper wire in the lights, heaters and power heads. Adding cooprisorb either made things better, or the timing was coincidental.

Bear in mind that at likely binds many metals, so even if it helps, that’s not proof copper was the problem.

 

[mfinn]

Obviously not on purpose. I have copper wire in the lights, heaters and power heads. Adding cooprisorb either made things better, or the timing was coincidental.

Copper wires in lights don't touch the water so that's not a issue.
If you have exposed copper in a powerhead or a heater, you have more of a issue than a copper wire in the water.

 

[Dkeller_nc]

Thought about this thread while I was doing tank maintenance yesterday, and here's a few possibilities along the lines of an introduced toxin vs. equipment failure.

Do you use any household cleaning product that might have benzalkonium bromide/chloride in it? The typical product that contains this is lysol or lysol look-alikes. I ask this because very tiny amounts of aerosal of these products will absolutely nuke a tank when drawn in through a skimmer (or less likely, directly sprayed onto the tank by an unknowing house cleaner).

Along those same lines, is it possible that you had any (and I do mean any) suntan lotion on your skin when you reached into the tank? The common ingredient in PABA-free suntan lotions is deadly toxic to corals in the parts-per-trillion range.

A final, way-out-of-the-box idea would be any painting or refinishing of anything inside your house where you might've used a Zinsser product (a common one is Kilz). Zinsser specializes in shellac-based primers, sealers and coatings, and the solvent for all of these is ethanol. There's at least 2 threads on this forum where use of these products inside a home/business in a spray form nuked tanks (one almost 400 gallons). It's not that the coatings themselves are toxic, but the amount of ethanol that made it into the tank water through the skimmer was a sufficient carbon dose to cause a massive bacterial bloom, and that killed everything in the tank.

 

[BradB]

Thought about this thread while I was doing tank maintenance yesterday, and here's a few possibilities along the lines of an introduced toxin vs. equipment failure.

Do you use any household cleaning product that might have benzalkonium bromide/chloride in it? The typical product that contains this is lysol or lysol look-alikes. I ask this because very tiny amounts of aerosal of these products will absolutely nuke a tank when drawn in through a skimmer (or less likely, directly sprayed onto the tank by an unknowing house cleaner).

Along those same lines, is it possible that you had any (and I do mean any) suntan lotion on your skin when you reached into the tank? The common ingredient in PABA-free suntan lotions is deadly toxic to corals in the parts-per-trillion range.

A final, way-out-of-the-box idea would be any painting or refinishing of anything inside your house where you might've used a Zinsser product (a common one is Kilz). Zinsser specializes in shellac-based primers, sealers and coatings, and the solvent for all of these is ethanol. There's at least 2 threads on this forum where use of these products inside a home/business in a spray form nuked tanks (one almost 400 gallons). It's not that the coatings themselves are toxic, but the amount of ethanol that made it into the tank water through the skimmer was a sufficient carbon dose to cause a massive bacterial bloom, and that killed everything in the tank.

I don't use Lysol, and wasn't cleaning before or during when the tank problem started. I haven't done painting or refinishing in almost a year.

I do use suntan lotion, especially in the spring, but rarely towards the end of July, and did not that day or any day near the crash.