Shut down a 40 gallon breeder, and moved the coral into my FOWLR tank, as the fish had been removed due to ich. I had been pretty lax on checking parameters, mostly salinity, and doing water changes. Now that all the coral is in there (LPS duncans, galaxea, zoas, it will not open up. I have been focusing on water parameters and my nitrates were through the roof in the 90 gallon, and phosphate was also very high. I have checked my well water for nitrates and alk, nitrates come in at 0.25 and alk is 12.5-13 with a water softener. RODI is coming this weekend. I also am getting a lot of green hair algea on my sand as well.
90 gallon oceanic
20 gallon sump
Bubble magus curve 5
Refugium with live rock and chaeto with a grow light, growing fast.
2 Hydor 1000gph powerheads blowing the same direction to create a gyre, but not pointing at anything directly
48 inch reefbreeders Photon v2 blues/uv/royals at 45% whites at 15% for 12 hours mounted 8 inches over tank about 30,000 lux at the water surface ( turned down a bit because the one torch head bleaching scared me)
Water stuffs:
1.025 - 1.026
Ph 8.0
KH 13.5
PO4 - 0.02 - 0.04
Po3 - 13ppm
Ammonia 0
Mag 1450
Cal 375
I know my well water is hard, 13dkh. So every time I top off, it adds to the already high alkalinity. I am going to do a few partial water changes using distilled water.
I am dosing vodka, about 10ml / day to help bring the nitrates down, and I just harvested 2, 1 gallon bags of chaeto from the refugium.
So after all of that I guess my question is, do you think the high nitrates / alkalinity is making the coral unhappy? And what else can I do to fix nitrates? Just wait and let the chaeto and dosing vodka do its job?
Went from this:
To this: This is after fish removed, and coral from my 40 I shut down moved into the 90.
90 gallon oceanic
20 gallon sump
Bubble magus curve 5
Refugium with live rock and chaeto with a grow light, growing fast.
2 Hydor 1000gph powerheads blowing the same direction to create a gyre, but not pointing at anything directly
48 inch reefbreeders Photon v2 blues/uv/royals at 45% whites at 15% for 12 hours mounted 8 inches over tank about 30,000 lux at the water surface ( turned down a bit because the one torch head bleaching scared me)
Water stuffs:
1.025 - 1.026
Ph 8.0
KH 13.5
PO4 - 0.02 - 0.04
Po3 - 13ppm
Ammonia 0
Mag 1450
Cal 375
I know my well water is hard, 13dkh. So every time I top off, it adds to the already high alkalinity. I am going to do a few partial water changes using distilled water.
I am dosing vodka, about 10ml / day to help bring the nitrates down, and I just harvested 2, 1 gallon bags of chaeto from the refugium.
So after all of that I guess my question is, do you think the high nitrates / alkalinity is making the coral unhappy? And what else can I do to fix nitrates? Just wait and let the chaeto and dosing vodka do its job?
Went from this:
To this: This is after fish removed, and coral from my 40 I shut down moved into the 90.