How to improve SPS color?

[Reefs anonymous]

FWIW, I’m running 2 mp10, 2 current power head on their wave maker, and 1000gph return on a 50 gallon tank. Yes, I have water movement. Its at least 100 times display And it’s random. Lol

 

[vetteguy53081]

Alk doesn’t seem be absorbed quickly and temp can be raised a couple of degrees. Also salt should be 1.025-1.026.
Water flow- moderate to strong but not a riptide strong

 

[stefanm]

If your parameters are truly in line, buy yourself a potassium test kit, I’d bet it’s low. Shoot for 400 (don’t remember the units). Bring it up and keep it steady there, feed chili powder or amino acid and report back in about a month .

Feed chili powder? Extra hot or mild?

 

[Silentreefer]

Feed chili powder? Extra hot or mild?

Da BOMB sauce dried up and made in to powder

 

[Silentreefer]

Alk may not go down quickly if you are stressing the corals from all these changes along with being malnourished. Along with the top off water having alk. What salt do you use by the way?

 

[Tjakes680]

Lower Alk and maybe try coral color from Britewell

 

[Tjakes680]

Lower Alk and maybe try coral color from Britewell

 

[Tjakes680]

Lower Alk and maybe try coral color from Britewell

 

[Tjakes680]

Lower alk add some T5 s to ur radion

 

[DesertReefT4r]

Excuse me , But your salinity is to high it should be at 1.023 refractometer should read as 35 ppt

35ppt is 1.0265 not 1.023. Ime 1.023 is low for a reef tank.

 

[Dkeller_nc]

hello all! I have recently gotten into the SPS world and I have some questions. My sps grow great, but they have lost color over the weeks ive had them. I feed Reef Chili twice a week and my fish are fed three days a week. below are my parameters:

Luke - Went back and read your initial post. Unless you've a really weak/small return pump, I seriously doubt that it only has 150 gph flow. That'd be a really tiny pump, such as the Sicce Syncra 0.5. What would make more sense is that you have a 1500 gph return pump, and you're probably getting about 1/2 - 3/4 of that rated flow once head pressure is factored in. That's more than enough for a 100 gallon tank.

You initial post doesn't mention anything about in-tank flow. As others mentioned on the thread, this is absolutely necessary for SPS, though you can get away with just the return-pump flow for LPS in some cases. When thinking through this (if you don't actually have in-tank flow), keep in mind that more and smaller powerheads is much better than fewer and bigger powerheads. The reason for this is that there's a limit to how fast the flow can be over even SPS before you're impacting the coral's health, this is even more true for LPS. Most DC-powered pumps like Tunze's Stream, Ecotech's Vortech, and the Maxspect Gyre are easily capable of coral-blasting force if aimed directly at them. And where the pump is not directed, you can have "dead" spots. So you can see that if you had, for example, only one Vortech MP40, you'd have a lot of flow in the general direction of the pump, and not much elsewhere. And if you crank the velocity of the pump to get OK flow "elsewhere", the direct stream from the pump will be way too much.

There's no doubt that more and smaller pumps costs more than fewer and bigger pumps, so there's a trade-off. And at some point you don't want to go completely overboard and populate your tank with 20+ powerheads. Because you've LPS in the tank that will not tolerate really high flow levels, I'd suggest something fairly modest, like starting with 2 Tunze 6040 nanostreams (on sale at the moment), or 2 Vortech MP10s. Don't be fooled by the small size of either of these pumps - they put out massive amounts of flow. And at some point later, you can add two more for a total of 4 - that will easily give you more than enough flow for a 100 gallon SPS tank, and give you 4 flow points to even out the flow field and avoid the blasting/stagnant issue that comes with having only one, bigger pump in a tank.

 

[Cassian]

Alk may not go down quickly if you are stressing the corals from all these changes along with being malnourished. Along with the top off water having alk. What salt do you use by the way?

I use IO reef crystals

 

[Dr. Dendrostein]

hello all! I have recently gotten into the SPS world and I have some questions. My sps grow great, but they have lost color over the weeks ive had them. I feed Reef Chili twice a week and my fish are fed three days a week. below are my parameters:

Salinity: 1.023
Kh: 12
PH: 8.1
Cal: 430
Mag:1300
Nitrate, Nitrite, Ammonia: 0 ppm
Temp: 75-76

Lighting:
Radions Xr30w gen4
running reef lab ABS program at 50% for 12 hours and deep blues at night for 4 hours
I used to run Shallow reef at 70% for 12 hours, but I think I was blasting them with light so I changed this about a week ago.

Flow:
Return pump (close to 150 GPH I think. I can find out if this is important for you to know)

Filtration:
400 micron filter sock changed once a week
Bubble Magnus protein skimmer running 24/7
various filters in-between skimmer and pump


I have great PE at night an slightly less during the day. of you have any suggestions please let me know. thanks in advance!

I'm not SPS kind of guy, but reading the different threads I wonder if your temperature is fluctuating higher than what you posted, a large fluctuation of temperature maybe stressing the corals. Just an observation

 

[Bruno Sette]

Many forum users are recommending to set a lower KH.

But this BRS TV Investigate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i66hnO04Z4U showed that a KH of 12 makes the corals grows a lot faster.

Is a KH of 8 really good for SPS colors ?

 

[Eagle_Steve]

I use IO reef crystals

IO/RC Mixes at about 13. If you are aiming for lower alk, you will either need to switch salts, or mix the salt, acid the salt, and then aerate the salt to get the PH right after you acid it.

But whatever you decide to do, as there has been a ton of good info posted, but different views, DO IT SLOWLY. I have a high alk SPS tank, ULNS SPS tank and a ton of mixed tanks, and any change I make I make it slowly. For example, I am tired of trimming acros every week in my high alk/high nutrient tank and am bringing it down to around 8 instead of 13. I just turned the doser down to 3/4 for a week, and am down to 1/2 of what it was for this week. Next week will be figure out where to set the doser to maintain it.

Acros will grow in anything to be honest, but the tank must be stable, the tank have the big 3 in check and some form of nutrients, good flow, and decent light are needed. The one key thing between all these tanks is stability and any changes are slow changes.

 

[mshonk]

I recently was in this exact spot. I reduced my alk from 10 to 7dkh.Started dosing no3 and feeding reef roids daily and feed my fish twice daily. I also picked up Red Sea's color tests and supplements. This was my thread.

https://www.reef2reef.com/index.php?threads/504602/

SPS Color Issues

 

[Cassian]

thank you all very much! I checked KH today and it was 10.9, so looks like RODI is working. fed reef chili and am still having great polyp extension. ill keep everyone posted if color starts to come back

 

[Cassian]

I recently was in this exact spot. I reduced my alk from 10 to 7dkh.Started dosing no3 and feeding reef roids daily and feed my fish twice daily. I also picked up Red Sea's color tests and supplements. This was my thread.

https://www.reef2reef.com/index.php?threads/504602/

SPS Color Issues

that is certainly an improvement! thanks!

 

[Cassian]

IO/RC Mixes at about 13. If you are aiming for lower alk, you will either need to switch salts, or mix the salt, acid the salt, and then aerate the salt to get the PH right after you acid it.

But whatever you decide to do, as there has been a ton of good info posted, but different views, DO IT SLOWLY. I have a high alk SPS tank, ULNS SPS tank and a ton of mixed tanks, and any change I make I make it slowly. For example, I am tired of trimming acros every week in my high alk/high nutrient tank and am bringing it down to around 8 instead of 13. I just turned the doser down to 3/4 for a week, and am down to 1/2 of what it was for this week. Next week will be figure out where to set the doser to maintain it.

Acros will grow in anything to be honest, but the tank must be stable, the tank have the big 3 in check and some form of nutrients, good flow, and decent light are needed. The one key thing between all these tanks is stability and any changes are slow changes.

thank you !

 

[Dkeller_nc]

Many forum users are recommending to set a lower KH.

But this BRS TV Investigate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i66hnO04Z4U showed that a KH of 12 makes the corals grows a lot faster.

Is a KH of 8 really good for SPS colors ?

The BRS video (and others that have posted to this effect) is correct - you absolutely can keep acros in high "supersaturated" alkalinity. The LFS that I frequent keeps the alkalinity in the main acro tank at about 13 dKH. He has great success with this, and can often "color up" pale corals that have come in from a collector's tanks in fairly bad shape. But there's a few keys to this - one is that he feeds really concentrated phyto (reef nutrition's Shellfish Diet) and Oyster Feast twice a day, isn't in the least shy about feeding his fish, and maintains phosphate at around 300 ppb. And the tanks are lit by old-school metal halides, and, believe it or not, VHO actinics. Some of the best lighting every invented for coral health.

In other words, definitely not low-nutrient conditions. So one has to attach and asterisk to the thought of running supersaturated alkalinity and calcium; there's been an awful lot of posts over the years noting that the combination of high alkalinity and low to ultra-low inorganic nutrient levels and no specific feeding is a recipe for "burned tips", pale colors, and in the worst case, RTN.

 

[rossco]

So, just a little update, I have brought up my salinity slightly, changed my lights to 11 hour photoperiod (goal is 9 hour)

I have been having very good results running my Radion XR30’s from 7:30AM to 11PM, with the main photo period being 8 hours but having lower level blues from the start until about 10:30, then the main photo period of a modified AB+ program, and then ramping down to low level blues again throughout the evening. They have been running for a year now. I do run just 2 T5 bulbs for 4 hours a day along with the Radions to prevent shading.

I don’t want to clutter your thread with my pictures, but I’ve posted a few FTS this spring in my build thread you can look at. I can send you my schedule to take a look at if you want.

As far as nutrients go, I think you are on the right track. For what it’s worth, I keep my alk at 9 - 9.5.

Adding flow should help. First hand experience, I have had a frag area in my sump for over 10 years. When I first started utilizing it, I just put the frag rack and lights over it and the frags just sat there and looked sad. Even though the display was thriving. I put a MP10 in and they colored up and started growing and thriving.

 

[Cassian]

I have been having very good results running my Radion XR30’s from 7:30AM to 11PM, with the main photo period being 8 hours but having lower level blues from the start until about 10:30, then the main photo period of a modified AB+ program, and then ramping down to low level blues again throughout the evening. They have been running for a year now. I do run just 2 T5 bulbs for 4 hours a day along with the Radions to prevent shading.

I don’t want to clutter your thread with my pictures, but I’ve posted a few FTS this spring in my build thread you can look at. I can send you my schedule to take a look at if you want.

As far as nutrients go, I think you are on the right track. For what it’s worth, I keep my alk at 9 - 9.5.

Adding flow should help. First hand experience, I have had a frag area in my sump for over 10 years. When I first started utilizing it, I just put the frag rack and lights over it and the frags just sat there and looked sad. Even though the display was thriving. I put a MP10 in and they colored up and started growing and thriving.

thanks for the info! if you could pm me your radion schedule, that would be awesome!