pseudorand
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- Oct 29, 2019
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I think I just dropped my salinity by 0.007. How should I bring it back up?
I came home from a 2 week vacation. I checked my tank, at all my fish are at least alive. Many of my corals seemed fine, but I haven't scraped the algae yet, so it's hard to tell. I removed my auto feeder and fed frozen. When I'm away, I leave both the feed to my ATO reservoir filler and my skimmate drain open. Things seemed fine, so I closed them both. The ATO reservoir was full, the skimmate locker was empty.
Fast forward two hours. The power is off because the sump water level got too low. There is water on the floor and in the cabinet under my external skimmer. The ATO reservoir is empty and the skimmate locker is full of clear fluid.
The good news is that the shutoff worked as designed. The bad news is that my ATO dumped 5+ gallons of RO/DI into my 120 + 20gal sump.
No one is doing the backstroke yet, so no need to panic. I refilled the sump with fresh salt mix, drained my skimmate locker and turned things back on. The skimmer did not start overflowing. Time for a water test.
Typically my salinity is steady as a rock at 1.027. I test it first and it's at 1.020. That's a huge drop.
First question: Since this just happened, should I bring it at least part of the way back up quickly by doing a high-salt water change, or just turn off the ATO and manually top of with salt mix for a week?
Second -- what the heck? Why would my skimmer suddenly overflow from feeding frozen, something I do every day when I'm not on vacation?
Third: Does anyone know how to calculate how much fresh must have been added to my 140g of salt to drop it from 1.027 to 1.020? I've had my skimmer overflow before, and (from memory) 5 gal of fresh dropped it by about 0.001 rather than 0.007. I'm wondering if the skimmer hasn't been overflowing semi-regularly while I was on vacation such that it dropped slowly and was probably only slightly higher before tonight's overflow. Since the power was still on that seems unlikely, but perhaps it just hadn't overflowed that badly until I added the frozen.
I came home from a 2 week vacation. I checked my tank, at all my fish are at least alive. Many of my corals seemed fine, but I haven't scraped the algae yet, so it's hard to tell. I removed my auto feeder and fed frozen. When I'm away, I leave both the feed to my ATO reservoir filler and my skimmate drain open. Things seemed fine, so I closed them both. The ATO reservoir was full, the skimmate locker was empty.
Fast forward two hours. The power is off because the sump water level got too low. There is water on the floor and in the cabinet under my external skimmer. The ATO reservoir is empty and the skimmate locker is full of clear fluid.
The good news is that the shutoff worked as designed. The bad news is that my ATO dumped 5+ gallons of RO/DI into my 120 + 20gal sump.
No one is doing the backstroke yet, so no need to panic. I refilled the sump with fresh salt mix, drained my skimmate locker and turned things back on. The skimmer did not start overflowing. Time for a water test.
Typically my salinity is steady as a rock at 1.027. I test it first and it's at 1.020. That's a huge drop.
First question: Since this just happened, should I bring it at least part of the way back up quickly by doing a high-salt water change, or just turn off the ATO and manually top of with salt mix for a week?
Second -- what the heck? Why would my skimmer suddenly overflow from feeding frozen, something I do every day when I'm not on vacation?
Third: Does anyone know how to calculate how much fresh must have been added to my 140g of salt to drop it from 1.027 to 1.020? I've had my skimmer overflow before, and (from memory) 5 gal of fresh dropped it by about 0.001 rather than 0.007. I'm wondering if the skimmer hasn't been overflowing semi-regularly while I was on vacation such that it dropped slowly and was probably only slightly higher before tonight's overflow. Since the power was still on that seems unlikely, but perhaps it just hadn't overflowed that badly until I added the frozen.
