help losing sps

[Graffiti Spot]

better flow is always a good thing for your corals. :)

+1 on that, I use two mp60s and two mp40s on my 3' cube :)

I would imagine the op knows what flow he needs if all the frags and colonies came from an old tank though.

Op, carbon certainly would not hurt anything and could help since your incoming tds has never been 0. I would certainly fix this.

Maybe telling us more about your tank and how the filtration works will help since we all have a different opinion on what it could be. A lot of the time it's a simple answer we are overlooking.

 

[Gpettit721]

This happened to me a few months ago.... i ended up feeding a lot more and it stopped

 

[edosan]

Have you try to get down recently your no3 or po4?

 

[Alan600]

It's a cadlights 100 gal I'm using the sump it came with i have a deltec skimmer rated for 180 gal and turf scrubber. About 100 puns of lr and 40 pounds of sand . 6 fish in the tanks

 

[Alan600]

I did a 40 gal w/c about a week ago and that's when everthing started to stn or rtn but it only happens at night not during the day

 

[Alan600]

 

[Alan600]

 

[luke33]

I dipped about 5 colony and 5 frags to see if was aefw but I found nothing . What do you mean test solution?

I'm talking about your sg, you may think your at 1.026 but your refractometer could be off. You can get a solution that will read 1.026 to see if your refractometer is accurate. Or just take your meter to a pet store and see what their water reads. This happens more often than people think

 

[Alan600]

Today I took to my lfs and had had 2 of my buddy's test it with there refractor meter and all tested at 1.025

 

[mcarroll]

I have not measured my par . This tanks has been up for 5 months everything was thriving growing until a week ago I started to notice I was getting stn and some frags just rtn over night .

That's a typical new-tank pattern....up to several months before things destabilize. Too many corals too fast is still my guess, but there's no reason to assume this was the only factor, so it doesn't have to be catastrophic in order to matter.

As Far As Flow
An mp10 is good for about a 12-18" diameter of space
...the mp40 about 24"
...I'm guessing, but the other three are probably in the 24" class too.

In a tank of your dimensions, you've got 13 cubic feet of space with – assuming no overlap between pumps – only about 10 cubic feet worth of mixing power. You've got at least three cubic feet worth of dead/under-flowed space.

I know this is a weird way to think about pumps and flow, but it's just not as one-dimensional as "9000 GPH" and this is one way to look at it differently. :) Plus I'm usually good for a little weird. :D

And you still have to be the judge...I can tell you my experience and do numbers, but your the one that sees the tank. :) And like I mentioned before, your flow could be good and still be better....so even if there's not a problem with flow per-se, this all might be of interest.

 

[mcarroll]

Also, how were the frags made? Any chance it was just a batch that was stressed for some reason and the tank itself is fine?

 

[Russ265]

i doubt it is the age of the tank given he transfered from an existing one. especially this late in the game.

we can only test for a small portion of "stuff" in our tank and unfortunately this seems the basis for all aquarists to go off of. (maybe a parameter is off) we think to ourselves.
the dangerous course of action is to think that just because the stuff we CAN test for is good, means it is.

a 50% waterchange would be a good indicator if it stops (or even slows) the bleeding.

 

[george1381]

What ever it is it started with the 40 gal water change. Something definitely went wrong at that point. Good water changes is a good way to get it to stop and it will stop if you get it in time.

 

[Jeddite]

If it starts after water change it may point that your alk in the water has been consumed and dropped maybe too low. Then after change you raise your alkalinity suddenly and this situation raises the stress on your SPS. Since alk swing is one of the most brutal disaster in sps world, you should monitor your parameters and if you have like 3-4 points bias, first you should raise your alk and then water change to close thr gap and have happy corals.

Cheers from Turkey.

 

[george1381]

A while back I did a water change that was a disaster, lost a lot of sps. I had almost zero fluctuation of perams. l had let my water sit for about a week in buckets 6 of them. There was i little bit of bubbling on top of the buckets. That was a bad water change but nothing showed on any test kit. What i did after that was a bigger, fresher, good water change. That is what stopped the decline for me.

 

[george1381]

I have had 3 big disasters. The bad water change, some kind of soap contamination and the most recent was a 9volt battery that went undetected in my sump, and that was a total loss of everything. I'm actually in the prosses of starting from scratch after 10 years.

 

[ifarmer]

Do you know all your frags name?. If you don't, chances are that you bought too many

 

[steveb]

Do you know all your frags name?. If you don't, chances are that you bought too many

umm....not the issue..

The tank is new but rock and water are from my old system . All the frags you see where from my colony nothing was added to the system