problems keeping sps alive???
 

i am having troubles keeping sps corals alive.
my tank is 125 gallon with a 100 gallon sump.
lighting i a diy led light consisting of 44 Xp-G cool white and 44 Xp-E royal blue dimmed with meanwell 48P's

my water parameters are
calcium 440 - 480
PH 8.1 - 8.2
Phosphate 0
ammonia 0.3 (just added a bag of new sand to tank)
KH 130
Nitrite 0.1
Nitrate 15
Salinity 1.025
Temperature 78.5

tank is 1 1/2 years old

usually within a day or 2 the sps are completely bleached.
i'm only running my led's at about 40 - 50%

any other info needed just let me know and i'll do my best to answer

what do you feed and what do you keep your temp.at??

water steady around 78.5
kent phytomax is the only thing i add to my tank

Does this happens to ALL sps, or you god some survivers? I have no experiense with your lightning, but when sps don't get light acclimated and put under too heavy light too fast, it throws out its zooxanthellas, gets beached and starves to death. Too high levels of nutriants do the opposite and you get å dark green or brown coral. Copper (cu) is å killer too. There are a great number of things that could be the answer. These are just a few thoths.

88 LED's is about twice wht I have on my 60... I had 48 on my 60 and needed to shut off 12... They cooked all the coraline off my rocks... Got worse when I added optics.

What kind of optics and how are they spread around the tank?

I would crank them down to 20%... any growth your LPS had will stop... slowly crank them up over months. Add a couple of SPS frags on a magnetic rack and slowly inch them up about an inch a week.


This is what I did on mine and I now have a green birdsnest on the top growing very well. My lights are at 50% (36 led's) and I am finally getting some LPS growth again. I am gonna leave them at this level until I get my hands on a PAR meter... I am hoping I can get them up a little more so my LPS on the bottom grow again like before...

no optics
they are spaced about 3 inches apart
i have a few softies that seem to be doing ok
florida ricordia's splitting.
i have a gorgonian on the sand bed that does not grow but it always has it's polyps extended.

is my KH too low?

what kind of sps are you keeping? why dont u try something easier at first like capricornis?

just a perple digi frag once in awhile to see if it will survive but never does
now i'm just wondering what i should try next?

What percentage are your lights running at?

they were at 40% when i put this last digi frag in but the next day the tips are white now 3 days later the whole top half is now gone.
i just set the lights down to 30% they are usually 6 - 8" from the tank.

On the dkh scale your alk should run around 8.3 to 9.3. I'm not sure what scale or test you're using.
And it definitely sounds light-related.

I would take a hard look at your water parameters and the stablility of the tank.

kh 130 is in ppm
so i guess it would be 7.28 dh

x2

same thing happened to me when i tried a few sps frags. bleached out in 72 hours. it was definitely the water, my tank is still too new...

Any ammonia will kill off your SPS corals and your nitrates need to be near zero.

This, all readings should be zero. Your showing levels of all including ammonia.

As stated above, the ammonia should be 0. When that happens, give the tank time to adjust and then see how the coral does.