System upgrade opinion needed!

[Stussyredhat]

This is a one of my first post to Reef2Reef. I have been in the hobby for 3 years now and my tank is going on 3 years I am pretty satisfied with how it is going.

I am looking to change it up a little I currently have a 72 gallon display tank and roughly 130 gallons in my sump. What I am planning on doing is add 2 120 gallon tanks to the system. I want this to be one system for ease of maintenance, but will have the ability to take any system offline and be self-contained with a few valve changes.

I have all the tanks 2 empty, the pump to supply all tanks and skimmer that will handle the volume. I have decent growth now but I struggle with how the corals look, I dose and feed on a regular schedule but still my corals just don’t look as good as I would like.

Below is a somewhat current FTS as you can see I have a mix of corals. Is my problem that I have leathers, toadstool, anemone, and other soft corals in my tank? I have been reading a lot and have seen quite a bit of discussion of the chemicals released by softies may inhibit the growth of stony corals. Could one of my problems be I don’t run carbon? The big question is if I add the other tanks into the same system will this make things worse? The way I am wanting to set up the other tanks are a SPS tank and a FOWLR tank with non reef safe fish. I am looking for suggestions.

Thank you,
Matt

 

[patent]

Before I went to the trouble of hooking the other tanks up I'd try running the carbon to see if it looked better. The FOWLER shouldn't really be an issue either way, but the SPS could if you plug it in. I would think you are safe hooking at least 2 tanks together, the FOWLER and either of the other 2, but would take my time before adding the third to make sure you have a solution for the issues you've seen.

 

[turbo21]

with that many softies in a sps tank, you need to run carbon. softies release a whole bunch of stuff that can be detrimental to sps.

i wouldnt hook the fowlr in to that system, the big aggressive fish are notoroiusly dirty fish, and will have you battling nitrates in your tank. keep the tanks seperate where you dont have to worry about the nitrates (as much) as the reef tank

Bob