Help! Tanks going downhill fast! Like in a mater of overnight.

[Bugeater281]

So I have a small tank downstairs, 30gallons, sumped. Had an octo hob 100 skimmer. Sump has 200g going through it. Power heads move around 1500-2000 gallons.

I used reef crystals. My perimeters are as follows.

Alk-7.2
Nitrates-20-25ppm
Pho-0
Sal-1.025
Ph-???
Calcium-500
Mag-1450


So last night a couple coral didn’t look that great. Still colorful but had gotten a whiter color too them. I have lots on montis, 4 acros and some random stuff in there.

Last night I decided to try to bring my alk up from 7, so I did a 5g water change, then dosed some soda ash, that brought my alk up to 7.3(only dosed a little to raise it slowly.

However I was getting heavily shocked last night. Got zapped a good 5-6 times. So I started standing on some milk crate.

A couple days ago I was cleaning my pumps and found one circulation pump the wire was torn and had exposed copper(partly why I ended up doing a water change the following day).

I have 2 cleaner shrimp, and one damsel in the tank. Shrimp are acting normal. Tank perimeter have been pretty stable for the last few months. Only think is I did recently IS bring the salinity up from 1.023-1.025(had slowly dropped over the last 2 months).

I can home and it looks like nothing will survive. Should I do a massive water change? Or will that make things worse?

 

[Richard Newman]

Hi @Bugeater28, sorry for your problems.
I am sure others with far more experience will chime in.
However, based on your parms, a phosphate of 0 is not good. For good coral health some amount of trace phosphate needs to be present. One of the simplest ways to increase phosphate is to overfeed. That's my chosen method...lol But also why I have to run GFO to keep my phosphate around .06ppm.

Hopefully you can get your tank turned around quickly. I have read that corals are rather hardy and once elements are back in the water column they will eventually heal.

Best of luck!

 

[Arricefe]

#reefsquad

 

[MTBake]

Did you replace the faulty equipment rhat was shocking you? Stray electricity can cause issues for sure. I would use a gfci and ground probe so you don't keep getting shocked when working on the tank.

 

[Bugeater281]

Hi @Bugeater28, sorry for your problems.
I am sure others with far more experience will chime in.
However, based on your parms, a phosphate of 0 is not good. For good coral health some amount of trace phosphate needs to be present. One of the simplest ways to increase phosphate is to overfeed. That's my chosen method...lol But also why I have to run GFO to keep my phosphatearound .06ppm.

Hopefully you can get your tank turned around quickly. I have read that corals are rather hardy and once elements are back in the water column they will eventually heal.

Best of luck!

I’m running my coral to a buddies house. He has a 500g system, hopefully they make it.

 

[nereefpat]

Stray electricity can cause problems, for sure. I had a stylo RTN basically overnight from stray electricity.

Also, stability of salinity and alk are goals to have.

The phosphate doesn't concern me at all, personally. Unless you are checking it with a Hanna ultra low phosphorus (reads in ppb phosphorus, and you have to convert it), then I don't believe it's actually zero.

 

[Flippers4pups]

Electrical safety is the most important. Did you remove the defective pump back when you found the short? From your post, once you get "shocked" once is the time to stop and investigate why, ASAP! USE A MULTIMETER AND DISCONNECT EQUIPMENT ONE BY ONE TILL THE DEFECTIVE PIECE OF EQUIPMENT IS FOUND AND REMOVE! Use a grounding probe in tank and use of a GFCI circuit on all things plugged into a aquarium!

Safety first!

Large water change and use of GAC plus a polyfilter to remove metal contamination.

 

[Bugeater281]

Stray electricity can cause problems, for sure. I had a stylo RTN basically overnight from stray electricity.

Also, stability of salinity and alk are goals to have.

The phosphate doesn't concern me at all, personally. Unless you are checking it with a Hanna ultra low phosphorus (reads in ppb phosphorus, and you have to convert it), then I don't believe it's actually zero.

This is my thought on what happened. I’m going to run a new circuit this weekend. One that’s actually grounded. My other idea is it could be copper in the water. But I would expect my shrimp to be dead already. I got some special carbon from a friend who says it can remove copper. I’ll add that in.
Got the coral to my buddies. A lot of polyps are already open. Looks like my montis won’t make it(thankfully this is the freind I got them from, so I can get some new frags of them).

2 acros look like they will make it, the other 2 Indos could go one way or the other. So hopefully it’s not a complete loss. I just need to get my new tank set up.

 

[Bugeater281]

Electrical safety is the most important. Did you remove the defective pump back when you found the short? From your post, once you get "shocked" once is the time to stop and investigate why, ASAP! USE A MULTIMETER AND DISCONNECT EQUIPMENT ONE BY ONE TILL THE DEFECTIVE PIECE OF EQUIPMENT IS FOUND AND REMOVE! Use a grounding probe in tank and use of a GFCI circuit on all things plugged into a aquarium!

Safety first!

Large water change and use of GAC plus a polyfilter to remove metal contamination.

I got some gac, I’ll run new wiring this weekend.

I attempted to track down the culprit, but my multi meter had a dead battery. I’ll bring one from work. I tried it the old fashion way but by the time I started unplugging g stuff I stopped getting shocked.

So I’ll run a new separate 15amp circuit To this tank and a actually ground the wire this weekend, my house is from the 50s so I have 2 wire wiring.

 

[NewGoby]

PO4 should never be 0 - always keep some in the tank, anywhere from 0.03-0.05 ish is fine,

Drop calcium to 450 ish (slowly!)
Increase alk to 8.5

& like others have said, make sure to remove whatever is causing the stray electricity