Update:
Well it's been a few months between updates so I thought I'd fill you in on what's been happening.
Around October/November last year I lost quite a few corals and I wasn't sure why, I got an ICP test done to see if there was any obvious issues with the water chemistry but everything came back normal.
I wanted to work out why my corals were dying so I decided to try a few different things and see how we go, these were all done before xmas.
Firstly, the sump, skimmer, reefmat and base pump were all due for a 6 monthly clean, so I decided to do a big water change at the same time and do it all at once. Well I thought my sump was pretty clean but once I pulled everything out and got in there with a scraper cleaning the sump walls, the water started turning brown.
I cleaned all the equipment and pumped the dirty sump water out, I then drained about half of the display water out and refilled the system with fresh NSW.
I also reduced my lighting schedule gradually from 12 hrs to 10 as LPS don't need to much of a photo period, they're now running a 2 hour ramp up, 6 hour peak and 2 hour ramp down. My lights run at 60% and when I hired a par meter a couple months ago, the top rock ledge was 200, middle 120 and sand 80, so it's pretty standard really for what I have.
I'm also using NSW now after having used ASW for the last couple years, this was something I've been wanting to do for a while but never really followed through with. For me using NSW is just easier and quicker to do larger water changes were I don't have to mix salt and go through the process, where as I can just go to my LFS and pick up 100L NSW no problem and put it straight into the tank. Also the long term plan apart from upgrading to a bigger tank is to get an IBC where I can store 1000L of water, so it just made sense to make the change.
Fast forward to today and the tank is flourishing, all my corals are colouring up and opening bigger then before and it's so good to just sit back and enjoy it. I don't know what change has made the tank better but I'm really happy with how it's looking, and even tho I was away on holidays for a week the tank just ran itself didn't miss a beat.
I also installed a RF Power Switcher X4 which has my skimmer, reactor and pax bellum currently plugged into it.
It's a great piece of kit and I've currently set it to turn off the skimmer and reactor when the sump water level rises using the RF level sensor, and the pax is set to come for 8hrs during the night so I'm pretty happy with it.
I also added a few chromis and they've settled in nicely, and I put a LED strip underneath the tank to pimp it up a bit lol.
Happy reefing!
