This is going to be long, Ill do my best to keep it to cliff notes.
40 breeder with 20 gallon sump, mixed reef. 4 small-medium fish. Live Rock from KPAquatics (Florida Keys), 1 inch sand bed. Its about 10 months old.
I feed about twice a day, I mix it up between frozen and pellets.
Corals are just not thriving. 2 of my four acros are dying/barely hanging on. My birdsnest, which has always done excellent, is just about completely gone over the course of a week. My button scoly, acans, and one frogspawn are always retracted, probably going to be making a downturn soon.
BUT...... Zoas and Grandis are happy and growing, chalices are happy, though not growing as much as I would like, brain coral looks great and has developed some really nice colors since getting it 4 months ago. Another Euphyllia growing and splitting just great.
Algae isnt the worst issue, but it'd be nice to get better control of it. Its most likely GHA or turf algae, and possibly diatoms too?
I recently took the skimmer (Bubble Magus Curve 5) offline to get the nutrients up, and switched it out with just chaeto in the fuge. This helped, the problems were worse before this. The chaeto grows quite well, and I find I have to trim it atleast once a week. I think I was overskimming.
Here are the ICP results.
Elements
RODI
This is what Im pretty sure I know:
Calcium is high because Im dosing too much. Ill back off.
I need a couple more fish to add to the bioload.
Ill double check the salinity, but this is checked via refractometer and I had little doubt about its accuracy.
My thoughts/suspicions:
I leave my magfloat scrubber in the tank 24 hours/day, maybe this is causing some contamination?
Maybe Ill switch out my salt? I use Reef Crystals, and its always been solid to me before and lots of fantastic vendors use this?
The only inputs are: frozen food, Randy's DIY two part (Arm and Hammer baking soda for HCO3, and Preston Driveway heat for Ca+), occasional Reef Roids, pellets, and 4-stage RODI topoff.
I store my RODI water in a large Brute trashcan in the garage, this is solely for top-off.
I make 6-8 weeks of saltwater at a time that I store in 5-gallon food grade buckets. I notice there is a noticeable amount of sediment in the buckets the longer they are stored.
For the RODI sample, the silicon is very high. The sample was obtained after letting the line run for 15 minutes. Im not convinced the filters need to be replaced yet. Could the silicon be coming for the tubing line?
I know I have a couple posts out that are similar in nature, but I've just about reached my breaking point, and I was hoping that maybe these ICP results might point me in a constructive direction?
40 breeder with 20 gallon sump, mixed reef. 4 small-medium fish. Live Rock from KPAquatics (Florida Keys), 1 inch sand bed. Its about 10 months old.
I feed about twice a day, I mix it up between frozen and pellets.
Corals are just not thriving. 2 of my four acros are dying/barely hanging on. My birdsnest, which has always done excellent, is just about completely gone over the course of a week. My button scoly, acans, and one frogspawn are always retracted, probably going to be making a downturn soon.
BUT...... Zoas and Grandis are happy and growing, chalices are happy, though not growing as much as I would like, brain coral looks great and has developed some really nice colors since getting it 4 months ago. Another Euphyllia growing and splitting just great.
Algae isnt the worst issue, but it'd be nice to get better control of it. Its most likely GHA or turf algae, and possibly diatoms too?
I recently took the skimmer (Bubble Magus Curve 5) offline to get the nutrients up, and switched it out with just chaeto in the fuge. This helped, the problems were worse before this. The chaeto grows quite well, and I find I have to trim it atleast once a week. I think I was overskimming.
Here are the ICP results.
Elements
RODI
This is what Im pretty sure I know:
Calcium is high because Im dosing too much. Ill back off.
I need a couple more fish to add to the bioload.
Ill double check the salinity, but this is checked via refractometer and I had little doubt about its accuracy.
My thoughts/suspicions:
I leave my magfloat scrubber in the tank 24 hours/day, maybe this is causing some contamination?
Maybe Ill switch out my salt? I use Reef Crystals, and its always been solid to me before and lots of fantastic vendors use this?
The only inputs are: frozen food, Randy's DIY two part (Arm and Hammer baking soda for HCO3, and Preston Driveway heat for Ca+), occasional Reef Roids, pellets, and 4-stage RODI topoff.
I store my RODI water in a large Brute trashcan in the garage, this is solely for top-off.
I make 6-8 weeks of saltwater at a time that I store in 5-gallon food grade buckets. I notice there is a noticeable amount of sediment in the buckets the longer they are stored.
For the RODI sample, the silicon is very high. The sample was obtained after letting the line run for 15 minutes. Im not convinced the filters need to be replaced yet. Could the silicon be coming for the tubing line?
I know I have a couple posts out that are similar in nature, but I've just about reached my breaking point, and I was hoping that maybe these ICP results might point me in a constructive direction?