Need help determining nitrate... and need help in general!

lba4590 · Jun 5, 2021

So I went away for a week for a vacation and came back to a lot of chaos as usual.. so far this seems to be the trend when I leave for more than a day..

All of my hammers and frogspawn are bailing polyps. Some bailed before I got home. Wall hammer and torches are ok for now, but so far my frogspawn bailed 4 out of 7 heads, 1 hammer bailed all 4, 1 hammer bailed 2 out of 5 heads. My elegance is also closed up and looks extremely ticked. Also one type of BTA that I have looks unhappy. Softies look just fine. Also going through major cyano outbreak which started when I started dosing nopox, but I’m sure it’s because my NO3/PO4 ratio is out of wack.

Just tested all of my parameters:
Salinity 1.025
Temp 80.5 (have fans on it now.. who knows how long it’s been high)
Cal 390
Mag 1300
Alk 9.4
PO4 0.05
NO3 40ish? Picture included - really not sure

With all of the above issues.. low cal, high nitrates, high temp, cyano.. what is likely stressing my euphyllia the most? I’m doing a big water change tomorrow, making water now

Jekyl · Jun 5, 2021

How hot do you think it got? Parameters listed don't seem extreme enough to cause issues besides maybe a cyano outbreak from the swing.

PeterC99 · Jun 5, 2021

Any changes in lighting, flow, or parameters over the weekend?

lba4590 · Jun 6, 2021

Jekyl said:
How hot do you think it got? Parameters listed don't seem extreme enough to cause issues besides maybe a cyano outbreak from the swing.

It was actually quite cold for the first few days and I had someone taking care of my tank for me (but knows nothing about it, just feeding and keeping an eye out). My ink bird was alarming low temp and she let me know, maybe on day 3, which will go off if the tank hits 77. I keep it set to 78. The following couple of days was much hotter, in the high 80s/90s but I didn’t hear anything from her about an alert high. It was going off when I got home and the temp was 80.7. So possible swing from 77-81 would be my guess, over a week. Crazy NC temps. Had my thermostat set on 73 while we were gone.