- Joined
- Oct 18, 2017
- Messages
- 86
- Reaction score
- 49
Help, losing sps sticks, favias, chalices etc. tank is just over 3 years old. Have had happy sps for over 2 years. Levels and logs in the photos. Tank is 100 gallons, have Protine skimmer and marine pure bricks for filtration. Random carbon from time to time. Calcium reactor, radion gen 4 pros on modified but mostly AB+.
Story. Around end of March everything was very happy. I started dosing brightwell coral amino for about 3 weeeks or so to try and feed/boost colors. It had the opposite effect. And without the refugium (been offline for a year) it was raising my nitrate and phosphate and muted out colors on a few corals. So I stopped.
Then April/May I noticed the hellrider favia and green slimer sps started peeling tissue. They acted like when I had a larger alk spike to high 8s. Last year. My tank has always been happy in the 7s Then in June almost everything started declining rapidly. That was around the time I swapped salts from reef crystals to Red Sea blue bucket as it’s closer to my target levels.
I did a few water changes and ran some carbon and a small hit of feric oxide to remove phosphates. Things weren’t improving. So I did more water changes. Then realized my refractometer was out of calibration and the tank was up to 41 salinity. That was just over a week ago. I don’t know if has been off for months or just in the last month because of the water changes. Things were unhappy before the waterchanges. But did get worse after them. The salinity has been corrected for a week.
At this point things are looking pretty desperate. I know I need time. But I hoped correcting salinity would be it and at least stabilize. Then wait for the corals to heal up over the next Months but they are still declining. Any advise other then (more time) there is an icp test in the mail. And I have a hard time thinking it’s the salt, but would potentially swap back to reef crystals.
Story. Around end of March everything was very happy. I started dosing brightwell coral amino for about 3 weeeks or so to try and feed/boost colors. It had the opposite effect. And without the refugium (been offline for a year) it was raising my nitrate and phosphate and muted out colors on a few corals. So I stopped.
Then April/May I noticed the hellrider favia and green slimer sps started peeling tissue. They acted like when I had a larger alk spike to high 8s. Last year. My tank has always been happy in the 7s Then in June almost everything started declining rapidly. That was around the time I swapped salts from reef crystals to Red Sea blue bucket as it’s closer to my target levels.
I did a few water changes and ran some carbon and a small hit of feric oxide to remove phosphates. Things weren’t improving. So I did more water changes. Then realized my refractometer was out of calibration and the tank was up to 41 salinity. That was just over a week ago. I don’t know if has been off for months or just in the last month because of the water changes. Things were unhappy before the waterchanges. But did get worse after them. The salinity has been corrected for a week.
At this point things are looking pretty desperate. I know I need time. But I hoped correcting salinity would be it and at least stabilize. Then wait for the corals to heal up over the next Months but they are still declining. Any advise other then (more time) there is an icp test in the mail. And I have a hard time thinking it’s the salt, but would potentially swap back to reef crystals.