asylumdown
02/21/2014, 12:45 AM
Hi folks
I'll try and be brief as brief in this explanation as I can. I'm nearly at my wits end.
my tank is now 2 years old. SPS dominated 275 gallon reef (375 gallon total water volume). Tank is lit by 8 gen 1 radions, skimmed by a Deltec SC2560 internal skimmer, with nutrients managed via GFO and a reef dynamics recirculating biopellet reactor. Params are maintained by an auto doser running a 3 part (calcium chloride, baking soda, and Seachem magnesium) dosing program.
I've had outstanding success over the past year and a half, with limited algae growth, and SPS growth that's consistently impressed me. the majority of my colonies are the size of dinner plates, even though I bought them from frags.
About 3 weeks ago, I started having trouble which appeared in the form of burnt tips on a few colonies. I'm now at the point where 50% of my corals have visible damage, with 2 or 3 dinner plate sized corals on the verge of total collapse, and zero visible growth on all colonies. Unfortunately, a few things have changed in my tank recently, and I'm having a hard time pin-pointing what the issue is. Here's the recent history:
leading up to the holidays, I was battling a cyano issue. I credited this with a) cyano being resilient as heck, and b), my tank bioload having reached 'heavy' requiring lots of feedings. To combat it, in... I want to say november (might have been December), I dosed my tank with chemiclean. That knocked the cyano right out, but to make sure it didn't come back, I started an aggressive campaign of dosing with MB7. This triggered a bacterial bloom in my BP reactor the likes of which I had never seen, and, being a recirculating model with an obnoxiously small effluent line, very rapidly lead to my BP reactor clogging up. About a month ago, when I was so busy with school I barely had time to change a filter sock, I failed to check on my reactor for 5 days. In that time, the effluent line clogged up with such a thick bacterial biofilm that all water transit through the reactor stopped. Even though the pellets were still tumbling (it is a recirculating reactor after all), no oxygen was entering the reaction chamber.
The night I opened it up to check on it, my roommate, who was asleep on another floor with the door closed, came running downstairs in a panic thinking there was a gas leak. I've never experienced a smell like that before, and I hope to never experience it again.
No water from the dead reactor made it back in to the system, however, and I completely cleaned it out. I then modified the effluent line so that it couldn't possibly clog up again (this involved a drill press and some 1" pvc piping), and set it back up. The reactor is now churning away, producing a huge amount of bacterial mulm, which goes straight to the skimmer. I'd say that it is working efficiently for the first time since I set the tank up. This is backed up by the fact that since I 'fixed' it, the light dusting of dinos that has waxed and waned on my sand bed (I've confirmed their identity via a microscope) for the past 18 months has vanished completely, and I now need to clean my glass every 5-6 days instead of every 2.
Since Christmas, the other major changes have been: I ran out of GFO and switched brands to a high capacity bulk version. I've run GFO from day one, and have changed it every couple of weeks to every month depending on my maintenance schedule, but the brand change was recent. I have also periodically run carbon in the past, but always Kent brand, and not in a while. At the same time I got the GFO, I got a bulk order of ROX carbon and put some in a bag in my filter sock. I also switched from H2Ocean salt to Seachem's reef salt. The final change was that I switched from the 'oh-my-lord-you-cost-how-much?!?' brand of Seachem anhydrous calcium chloride, which lasted me 2 weeks per bottle, to a no-name (but from a very well respected distributor in Canada) brand of non-anhydrous bulk calcium chloride. This required some adjustments to my dosing regime, but I managed the switch using my test kits to make sure the dosing amount was correct.
So, that was a novel - but the result of all of that is that I now have a tank full of dying corals. As of today, my levels are:
calcium - 360ppm (low)
dKH - 9.0 (very high compared to where I normally keep it, which is 7)
mag - 1300.
nitrate - 0 (but I've never tested anything but zero)
phos - 0 (but I've never tested anything but zero)
The major damage to the corals has all been in the last 3 weeks. The changes in the last three weeks were the ROX carbon, the new brand of GFO, and the 'fixed' biopellet reactor. The changes that preceded the coral damage were the salt brand change, and change of calcium supplement brand. I keep cutting back my dosing rate of alk every time I test, but the levels keep climbing. I think it's because my coral growth rate has plummeted, so even with DRASTICALLY reduced dosing rates, the levels are still going up. I think the increase in alk has suppressed my calcium levels.
So - here's my three main hypothesis, and I'm hoping for some feedback:
1. My nutrients, which were never high enough to show up on a test to begin with, plummeted when I fixed my BP reactor. This caused coral growth rates to slow down, which caused my alk to spike, which caused burning and damage, which in turn lead to even higher alk levels because of the auto-doser. But is an alk of 9 even high enough to cause burning in an ULNS?
2. Something in my new brand of GFO or carbon is damaging my corals, which is causing my alk to spike.
3. Switching salts, which took a few water changes in such a large system to play out, is causing this issue.
Basically I'm not sure what to do here. I've got colonies I couldn't remove without a chisel and a bucket turning in to skeletons before my eyes. I thought maybe it was a 'shock' period that would pass, but every day something else is getting damaged. I'm terrified to start messing around with too many things and making it worse. Essentially I'm looking for 'sage advice' to guide me on what I should take offline/modify first.
I'll try and be brief as brief in this explanation as I can. I'm nearly at my wits end.
my tank is now 2 years old. SPS dominated 275 gallon reef (375 gallon total water volume). Tank is lit by 8 gen 1 radions, skimmed by a Deltec SC2560 internal skimmer, with nutrients managed via GFO and a reef dynamics recirculating biopellet reactor. Params are maintained by an auto doser running a 3 part (calcium chloride, baking soda, and Seachem magnesium) dosing program.
I've had outstanding success over the past year and a half, with limited algae growth, and SPS growth that's consistently impressed me. the majority of my colonies are the size of dinner plates, even though I bought them from frags.
About 3 weeks ago, I started having trouble which appeared in the form of burnt tips on a few colonies. I'm now at the point where 50% of my corals have visible damage, with 2 or 3 dinner plate sized corals on the verge of total collapse, and zero visible growth on all colonies. Unfortunately, a few things have changed in my tank recently, and I'm having a hard time pin-pointing what the issue is. Here's the recent history:
leading up to the holidays, I was battling a cyano issue. I credited this with a) cyano being resilient as heck, and b), my tank bioload having reached 'heavy' requiring lots of feedings. To combat it, in... I want to say november (might have been December), I dosed my tank with chemiclean. That knocked the cyano right out, but to make sure it didn't come back, I started an aggressive campaign of dosing with MB7. This triggered a bacterial bloom in my BP reactor the likes of which I had never seen, and, being a recirculating model with an obnoxiously small effluent line, very rapidly lead to my BP reactor clogging up. About a month ago, when I was so busy with school I barely had time to change a filter sock, I failed to check on my reactor for 5 days. In that time, the effluent line clogged up with such a thick bacterial biofilm that all water transit through the reactor stopped. Even though the pellets were still tumbling (it is a recirculating reactor after all), no oxygen was entering the reaction chamber.
The night I opened it up to check on it, my roommate, who was asleep on another floor with the door closed, came running downstairs in a panic thinking there was a gas leak. I've never experienced a smell like that before, and I hope to never experience it again.
No water from the dead reactor made it back in to the system, however, and I completely cleaned it out. I then modified the effluent line so that it couldn't possibly clog up again (this involved a drill press and some 1" pvc piping), and set it back up. The reactor is now churning away, producing a huge amount of bacterial mulm, which goes straight to the skimmer. I'd say that it is working efficiently for the first time since I set the tank up. This is backed up by the fact that since I 'fixed' it, the light dusting of dinos that has waxed and waned on my sand bed (I've confirmed their identity via a microscope) for the past 18 months has vanished completely, and I now need to clean my glass every 5-6 days instead of every 2.
Since Christmas, the other major changes have been: I ran out of GFO and switched brands to a high capacity bulk version. I've run GFO from day one, and have changed it every couple of weeks to every month depending on my maintenance schedule, but the brand change was recent. I have also periodically run carbon in the past, but always Kent brand, and not in a while. At the same time I got the GFO, I got a bulk order of ROX carbon and put some in a bag in my filter sock. I also switched from H2Ocean salt to Seachem's reef salt. The final change was that I switched from the 'oh-my-lord-you-cost-how-much?!?' brand of Seachem anhydrous calcium chloride, which lasted me 2 weeks per bottle, to a no-name (but from a very well respected distributor in Canada) brand of non-anhydrous bulk calcium chloride. This required some adjustments to my dosing regime, but I managed the switch using my test kits to make sure the dosing amount was correct.
So, that was a novel - but the result of all of that is that I now have a tank full of dying corals. As of today, my levels are:
calcium - 360ppm (low)
dKH - 9.0 (very high compared to where I normally keep it, which is 7)
mag - 1300.
nitrate - 0 (but I've never tested anything but zero)
phos - 0 (but I've never tested anything but zero)
The major damage to the corals has all been in the last 3 weeks. The changes in the last three weeks were the ROX carbon, the new brand of GFO, and the 'fixed' biopellet reactor. The changes that preceded the coral damage were the salt brand change, and change of calcium supplement brand. I keep cutting back my dosing rate of alk every time I test, but the levels keep climbing. I think it's because my coral growth rate has plummeted, so even with DRASTICALLY reduced dosing rates, the levels are still going up. I think the increase in alk has suppressed my calcium levels.
So - here's my three main hypothesis, and I'm hoping for some feedback:
1. My nutrients, which were never high enough to show up on a test to begin with, plummeted when I fixed my BP reactor. This caused coral growth rates to slow down, which caused my alk to spike, which caused burning and damage, which in turn lead to even higher alk levels because of the auto-doser. But is an alk of 9 even high enough to cause burning in an ULNS?
2. Something in my new brand of GFO or carbon is damaging my corals, which is causing my alk to spike.
3. Switching salts, which took a few water changes in such a large system to play out, is causing this issue.
Basically I'm not sure what to do here. I've got colonies I couldn't remove without a chisel and a bucket turning in to skeletons before my eyes. I thought maybe it was a 'shock' period that would pass, but every day something else is getting damaged. I'm terrified to start messing around with too many things and making it worse. Essentially I'm looking for 'sage advice' to guide me on what I should take offline/modify first.