Thriving to Death, need advise

[Johnson556]

On April 5th, I upgraded from a 90G Mixed Reef to my dream 180G SPS Tank. I did the transfer from a 10 month old 90G that was thriving. After a month there was still no sign of an algae bloom as 90% of the new tank had existing rock and sand from the old tank. I was happy with my stability and added 15 large frags/colonies in sticks. Parameters were rock solid for two months at at 8.5 Dkh, 430PPm, Potassium 390PPM. I tested every day and adjusted accordingly after the additions keeping my stability with no more than a .2 dKh swing.

Come July, boom Dino's like crazy. The ATS was now useless and I decided to do a blackout, went 3 days lights out and bleached out a bubble gum milli in the process, thought that was strange. Dino's were gone and I was very happy with the results. However, I was also in the phase of trying to get nitrates detectable as my sps started to get pale from the lack of nutrients. I have 5 tangs, 3 wrasse, 2 clowns, and an angel and could not get Phos/Nitrates detectable. I started feeding like crazy, adding acro power, and a lot of reef roids in the process. Caused a major green cyano bloom after about 2 weeks of this. To make things worse the heat caused the ph to drop to about 7.75 and resulted in my nice stable 8.5 dKh to jump to 9.8 in about 3-5 days. Burnt tips and RTN everywher. I added an airline from outside to my skimmer which brought the PH back to 8.2-8.3 daily.

As of August 5th, I went back to normal feeding and just finished a 2 day chemiclean blackout. Everything looks perfect again with the exceptions of my sticks. I've lost quite a few prized pieces and am hoping the rest will recover. I had a palm sized colony of red planet that is now just a bland red with some tissue pealing on the right tips. Lost its deep red and green color. Strawberry shortcake is now tan and light pink, not happy.

What would the masters do in my situation? My current plan is to add a few fish this week, and a few more next month hoping to slowly increase my bio load and get my nitrates to at least 2PPM. The scrubber has been taken offline, maybe I'll add a small fuge just for pods. Let the tank continue to mature.

I have a friend who has an amazing sps tank and set up a big frag tank. I want to raid it and snag another 15+ sticks from him but do not want a repeat. How should I proceed?

Current Set Up
-Corner Overflow 180G Tank
-Custom Canopy, 3 Kessil A360W, Six 80W T5's (B+,C+,B+,B+,Actinic,B+)
-60G Sump (7" Sock, Regal 250 Int Skimmer, BRS Deluxe Reactor for ROX, DCP 1500 Return)
-About 260Lbs of Live Rock, 140lbs of Special Grade Aragonite.
-4 Vortec MP40Qd's, controlled by a WXM
-Dosing is controlled by Apex and BRS 1.1ml Dosers, deliver 72ml each of ESV daily

 

[jda]

Keep the dosing stable. Keep the temp stable. Let the T5s do the heavy lifting and keep the Kessils low while the corals recover. Forget about what N and P actually test at and remember that heavy import and heavy export (throughput) is more important than having residual numbers on a test kit - feeding the fish twice as much puts twice as much N and P in your tank regardless of what your test kit says. Stop intervening and let nature take over - nobody likes algae, dinos, cyano, etc. but they are a rite of passage and any interference that you make will usually need repaid in multitude down the line. The ugly phase sucks, but just wait it out and be patient. You might need to slowly introduce some consumers of the algae - I started a new tank about 5 months ago and am just now getting through the ugly stage... last step was 10-12 turbo snails to finish up the hair algae that my sailfin was eating and has since quit.

Just be cool, do the right things (water changes, stability) and let the tank get stable. This was probably going to take 4-6 months, could take a bit more time now. When everything gets super-stable again, algae is gone and you have fresh dots of coralline popping up all over the place, then go and raid the frag tank. If he will keep the frags in the meantime, go and raid it now, pay the guy and have him keep the frags for you so that they can grow in his system until you are ready.

Edit: if you had enough food to cause a green cyano bloom, then you had enough before this for your corals - what you did was likely unnecessary. Stop with the aminos and reef roids and just feed the fist a good amount a few times a day. Feeding the fish a good amount so that they grow is fine, but I would not go past this.