So I get home from work last evening after working three 12 hour shifts over the weekend (I'm a nurse) and the first thing I do, as always, is look at the tank. Several things pop out at me...many corals closed up and looking angry, reddish brown stringy stuff everywhere and pH is 8.53 (normally at this time of day it would be 8 or just over). I know something is super wrong, I'm just not sure what yet. I'd had the protein skimmer off for a few days because I had epoxied some corals in place last week...so I figure it can't hurt to turn it back on and let it take stuff out of the water..of course it's still going nuts and taking out all kinds of water but I just diverted it into a pail and let it go. I figured I would just add makeup water and that would help things. Removed and replaced about 10-12 gal of water that way..it's an 80 gallon tank.
The pH was starting to slowly come down but I added a bit of vinegar just to help it along, not much...3 or 4ml. I blew algae or whatever it was off the corals with a turkey baster and would've liked to have siphoned some of it off the bottom and rocks, but I was just too beat. Ph was down to 8.3 by that time and I went to bed.
This morning the pH is ok at 8.1, quite a bit of the reddish brown stuff is gone but corals still looking pretty angry and upon having a closer look I believe they are expelling some of their zooxanthellae, though it's hard to tell because it looks a lot like the stringy stuff.
Time to do some testing...pH 8.11, temp 77.9, ammonia, nitrate are zero and nitrate is zero which I can't understand because I feed the fish quite heavily at least twice a day (frozen and sometimes a bit of masstick). Dkh is 7.8 and calcium is 504 and then 544! I checked it twice with the Hanna checker just to be sure. I have no way to test po4 at present but I did order a Hanna checker.
Now to what I've been doing (prepare for some user error because I know there's got to be some in here somewhere). I have a Tunze ATO where I run kalkwasser. I'm beginning to question the wisdom of this since we've had a few "incidents" involving you guessed it- user error. But it is what it is and that's what I have. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to add some two part in a rather random fashion since i forget to do it most days...but when I do I add about 8ml of each. As I said the protein skimmer was off for the three days. The return empties into a filter sock where I had some rather old carbon. No other filtration. For flow I have a Maxspect gyre 200 and an octopulse 2 power head. I have Kessil Tuna blue 360 lights x 2. Couldn't tell you what the settings are because I only got them working with the controller after fooling around with them for a few days until randomly something clicked. I haven't changed the settings because I don't know how I did it the first time and I'm afraid I won't be able to do it again! I can say it comes on about 9 am with just the blues..ramps up during the day to about 90% at around one pm and then at 4 slowly dims back down and goes off around 9pm. I have quite a lot of rock....some of it live and some is that manufactured rock made to look like live rock but comes in convenient shapes. I have one small bristle tooth tang, two clowns, a citron goby, two pearly jawfish, a melanarus wrasse and a possum wrasse. Also one cleaner shrimp, a tuxedo urchin, about ten various snails and three or four hermits. For corals I have mostly LPS, zoas and a few frags of SPS that I won at one of the online live sales.
That's about it..sorry for the long post but I wanted to give the most complete picture possible so if anyone wants to chime in to give me some advice that would be great! I'm worried about my corals, though all the fish seem to be fine. I'm not sure which direction to go next.
The pH was starting to slowly come down but I added a bit of vinegar just to help it along, not much...3 or 4ml. I blew algae or whatever it was off the corals with a turkey baster and would've liked to have siphoned some of it off the bottom and rocks, but I was just too beat. Ph was down to 8.3 by that time and I went to bed.
This morning the pH is ok at 8.1, quite a bit of the reddish brown stuff is gone but corals still looking pretty angry and upon having a closer look I believe they are expelling some of their zooxanthellae, though it's hard to tell because it looks a lot like the stringy stuff.
Time to do some testing...pH 8.11, temp 77.9, ammonia, nitrate are zero and nitrate is zero which I can't understand because I feed the fish quite heavily at least twice a day (frozen and sometimes a bit of masstick). Dkh is 7.8 and calcium is 504 and then 544! I checked it twice with the Hanna checker just to be sure. I have no way to test po4 at present but I did order a Hanna checker.
Now to what I've been doing (prepare for some user error because I know there's got to be some in here somewhere). I have a Tunze ATO where I run kalkwasser. I'm beginning to question the wisdom of this since we've had a few "incidents" involving you guessed it- user error. But it is what it is and that's what I have. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to add some two part in a rather random fashion since i forget to do it most days...but when I do I add about 8ml of each. As I said the protein skimmer was off for the three days. The return empties into a filter sock where I had some rather old carbon. No other filtration. For flow I have a Maxspect gyre 200 and an octopulse 2 power head. I have Kessil Tuna blue 360 lights x 2. Couldn't tell you what the settings are because I only got them working with the controller after fooling around with them for a few days until randomly something clicked. I haven't changed the settings because I don't know how I did it the first time and I'm afraid I won't be able to do it again! I can say it comes on about 9 am with just the blues..ramps up during the day to about 90% at around one pm and then at 4 slowly dims back down and goes off around 9pm. I have quite a lot of rock....some of it live and some is that manufactured rock made to look like live rock but comes in convenient shapes. I have one small bristle tooth tang, two clowns, a citron goby, two pearly jawfish, a melanarus wrasse and a possum wrasse. Also one cleaner shrimp, a tuxedo urchin, about ten various snails and three or four hermits. For corals I have mostly LPS, zoas and a few frags of SPS that I won at one of the online live sales.
That's about it..sorry for the long post but I wanted to give the most complete picture possible so if anyone wants to chime in to give me some advice that would be great! I'm worried about my corals, though all the fish seem to be fine. I'm not sure which direction to go next.
