Elegance and hospital tank

RushReefer2112 · Oct 12, 2017

I'm going to start off by saying that I've had an elegance coral do great in a tank before. It lasted for near 2 full years. That system we had a dosing pump. This system, doesn't have a dosing pump and I figure the 'every few day' dosing of brs 2 part I'm doing to this tank is just too much of a swing for this guy. I has been fine in this tank for roughly 2 months.

Cannot get a picture up right now but it's not as most other articles about tissue necrosis say. It clearly has tissue with color around the perimeter of it's skeleton. I'm thinking I caught it before it began TN. I've already performed a lugols dip and am in fear of the worst case scenario. Brown jelly. I have a bunch of euphyllia and a pretty large duncan colony ~40-50 heads that I don't want to lose (have lost a bunch before to a brown jelly infection and know how quickly it can ruin an LPS tank.)

I want to set up a ~10 gal hospital tank for the elegance where I can do daily water changes of close to 25-30% until I can see it has began to open back up. Chances are that by the time anyone answers this, the tissue will begin falling off, or it will have already began opening up. Hopefully the latter.

Should I put a small power head in the tank on low strength or should I do a air pump/stone? I'm in texas and the tank will be in an insulated room of 80°. I will buy a second apex temp probe and pm-1 to install (I've wanted to for a while) and setup alerts to phone for temp swings.

LMK

Edit: forgot to post tank params as of testing 30 minutes ago. If i forget anything else, let me know.

Salinity-35~1.026
pH- 8.16-8.23 (calibrated apex probe a week ago. 8.38 is from 2 part dosing)
temp- 77.5-78.5
Alk~9.2 (fairly stable, drops .2 daily, dosing to raise .4 every 2 days)
Calc-460
Mag- 1460
PO4-0
Nitrate-30 (this system has always had high nitrates. no algae or coloration issues at all. test kit may be bad. Have a elos test kit from BRS coming shortly.)

2 hydra 52's (non hd) over a 120 at 50% peak for 30 minutes

RushReefer2112 · Oct 12, 2017

I'm thinking I'm going to buy a doser because the cause of the issue (I'm guessing) is a combination of the alk swing and pH swing. But I really want to save this elegance. It's the size of my head!

Humblefish · Oct 12, 2017

Moved to LPS forum, where you will get more specific help.

#reefsquad for more input.

Elegance and flower pot are two of my "unicorn" corals that I can't seem to keep alive for very long. So I'm no help here.

saltyfilmfolks · Oct 12, 2017

Use tank old tank water and make sure you have a lid or ato.

Try to match and than lower slightly the lighting level.

Then do small water changes.

That'll even out any chance of a "swing". A natural drop is generally ok and wc don't swing it much based by volume.

I don't think it's you're ph. My acro tank swings more than that.

RushReefer2112 · Oct 12, 2017

Thanks for moving thread! At the time felt like a huge emergency.

After I did the Lugol dip I reduced light by 10% and a few hours later once I saw the tank, a side of it had opened up. I spot fed it just a few pieces of mysis and it took. Sticky to touch as usual which made me feel better about it. I decided against rushing together a tank. I know these are very tempermental and when something wrong happened, I looked back and compared the equipment I had.

I installed a ASOV (auto shut off for rodi) from BRS a few hours ago and decided to rearrange my tds meter to make things look nicer (yes, I'm a nut) and found a large clump inside the T at the probe post DI. I cleaned it out and my meter began reading ~12-18 tds. (I don't use the color changing resin. Used to going by tds meter reading high values.) It doesn't make sense to me how if there was a build up on the probe that my meter would read low, I would expect it to read higher, right? Anyways, I have a brs shipment coming hopefully tomorrow where tomorrow night I can change my resin out and do a WC on saturday. I'm also interested to see if the Salifert kit I'm testing nitrates with is indeed reading low as well. It would only make sense if I'm putting in more tds than expected to see the standard values that I've seen for the past year and a half read false. I'll try to update post tomorrow night. I'm now almost convinced the combination of high tds and test reading low nitrate is the cause here.

I'm just glad the elegance has fought through this and hopefully will make it to the WC day. I'm sure less tds will help a lot.

I will be filling up both DI canisters with color changing resin from now on! Haha thanks for the input guys. It may not seem like a lot but it is!!