My entire tank is slowly dying, HELP!

[ronman84]

I am a few days away from just tearing the entire tank down and starting over, hopefully someone here can help.

I have had this 24g Aquapod for 2 years but has been running for about 4-5years. It has a 10g sum with a DSB and Chaeto, a Prizm skimmer and a 150w Sunpod with a 7 month old 14k phoenix. I also sometimes run carbon. Plenty of liverock and water flow.

Water parameters tested by me and LFS
Ammonia, NO2, NO3, PO4 = 0
dKh = 11-12
Ca = 460
Mg = 1400

I have been battling hair algae in my tank ever since I bought it, but 2 months ago I started dosing Mg, Nitroactor7 and topping off with kalkwasser and my algae and cyano problems went away, YAY!

Everything was doing amazing for about a month until I started dosing kalkwasser with a drip system. I did not increase the dose of kalk rather I added it at a much slower rate, after a day or so, I saw my alk jump up to almost 15dKh. So I immediately did a 50% water change and let the alk come down on its own which took about a week (I only lost one of my SPS colonies).

So for the last 3 weeks now my water parameters have been stable and I've been doing 15% water changes every week with reef crystals and ro/di water. After the first week I started to lose the rest of my SPS, all dead in a few days. My LPS were showing signs of stress and looked like they were slowly dying too. So I moved my remaining corals into a 12g I had recently cycled with water from the problem tank, they are all doing fine now. the few zoas and mushrooms I have are all closed up, but my green star polyps seem to be doing fine.

I have a pair of clowns, a fire angel a cleaner wrasse, cleaner shrimp and crabs I feed every other day and they all seem to be unaffected. I also noticed that my chaeto has started to die off too, and there aren't as many critters in my refugium anymore, even the coraline algae is dying off.

I don't think its a parasite because corals moved out of the tank are doing fine now. I don't think its a water quality issue because of the frequent water changes. I don't think its the lighting because things are also dying in my refugium. My only hypothesis is that somehow my tank has become nutrient poor and everything is slowly starving to death.

Sorry for the long case history and thank you for any suggestions.

[mullinsd2]

DO yo feed your sps zooplankton?

[ronman84]

no zooplankton, I used to feed rotifirs once a week but stopped awhile ago and didn't notice any difference.

[TripleT]

I have a pair of clowns, a fire angel a cleaner wrasse, cleaner shrimp and crabs I feed every other day

I think you're starving your fish, and indirectly, your chaeto.

[ronman84]

UPDATE: I just took a small colony of zoas out of the problem tank and put them in the newer tank and they are already starting to open after only an hour or so. They have been closed for like a month.

[Jarred1]

I think you're starving your fish, and indirectly, your chaeto.

feeding every other day will not starve your fish i feed my fish like 3 times a week and you would notice it, looks like i feed them every day. the fish find food in the tank when you dont feed them, in fact there was a thread i read a few days ago that said they havent feed the tank in 2 years and their eel was still alive...

maybe your heater broke or some thing

[JLopez]

Stop dosing anything you normally would. Change 50% of the water over the course of 3 or 4 days. Dip your corals if they'r not looking good. from now on dose two part bionic and do frequent water changes.

[Dipandots]

What is your SG? And what do you use to find it?
Could it be stray voltage? (I'm unfamiliar with this topic)

[[17]shawn[17]]

feeding every other day will not starve your fish i feed my fish like 3 times a week

i feed my clowns every week your clearly not starving them

[Nano sapiens]

Did you add anything new to the aquarium recently. New rock? New sand?

A remember a similar case a good while back. The tank had been doing well for quite some time, but suddenly things went downhill...fast. All parameters checked out fine, but all the organisms weren't doing well. The problem in that case turned out to be an old, rusty piece of fish hook that had come in with some recently added coral sand.

Whenever everything in a tank is affected check for anything specific to that tank that might be causing poisoning or possibly even stray voltage.

[manhorsedog]

water changes are the key for me. I found dosing the tank just makes things harder. I 20% change once a week is the only thing you need.

[Jambi40-6&2]

feeding every other day will not starve your fish i feed my fish like 3 times a week and you would notice it, looks like i feed them every day. the fish find food in the tank when you dont feed them, in fact there was a thread i read a few days ago that said they havent feed the tank in 2 years and their eel was still alive...

maybe your heater broke or some thing

I have never seen any literature from a credible source that says not to feed at least once a day. They may live, but so would you but it would suck. The goal is to replicate the wild and you should feed fish and inverts every day. Maybe corals every other.

[ronman84]

Well the mystery has been solved !
I was tearing the tank apart today and I realized that I had used a brass barb fitting when I built my carbon reactor, I know all about copper and that it spells death to a reef tank I don't know what I was thinking! Anyway I'm ****ed I lost a bunch of coral and a went through a ton of aggravation over a $2 dollar hunk of brass. But needless to say I'll never make that mistake ever again. I bought some Cuprisorb and hope that along with water changes most of the copper will be removed that got into the tank. The crabs and snails are all fine, it must have been a combination of the copper and alk spike that killed my SPS. Thanks a lot for the help, I really appreciate it

[Jay Fortay]

What about PH?