Welp, complacency kills in this hobby, right?
Monday night my ATO resovoir was running low, so I added more Kalk and RO water, and gave the kalk time to settle out. What I didn't do is check to make sure the pump was clean; I'm guessing it had been sitting in the old kalk sludge at the bottom of the resovoir.
Once I had the pump suspended in the middle of the resovoir and it seemed like the lime had mostly settled, I turned the pump back on. I checked to make sure it was functioning, and while the water coming out was slightly cloudy, I didn't think much of it, since my kalkwasser has never been clear. Everything else looked good so I went to bed.
I should note at this point that this has been my process for 12 months or so, so I may have gotten sloppy in implementation.
I got a call from my wife at lunchtime on Tuesday that she thought there was a gas leak... I couldn't break away, but had her check some things. An hour later, one of the kids notices a dead fish. Uh oh. I get home on Tuesday night, and the whole house REEKS of dead ocean, the wife and kids have evacuated, and the tank is a swirling mess of milky white decomp.
It's pretty close to a total loss. I did a 20ish gal WC on Tuesday night, swapped out filter floss and cleaned the skimmer, and dosed with a double dose of Seachem Prime to try and bind up some ammonia. The clowns, gobi's, wrasses, urchin, shrimp, stars, etc were all dead. Most of the coral. Ammonia tested 5ppm on a cheap API test kit, and > 2 on the Redsea kit. After WC.
I did a 90% WC yesterday and dosed again with Prime. A handful of Zoa's look like they might pull through, and my duncan is still flourescing. One setosa still has some flesh that's not pulling off and oddly a branch of green slimer looks like it might pull through, but the rest is toast.
It's amazing how quickly a tank can crash!!!
Best guess I overdosed with lime solution, raised the pH in the tank, which caused something to die, and then the whole thing turned into toxic soup. Crazy thing is my ATO resovoir is only down < 1/10 of a gallon, so it was just a few spurts.
Another theory is that I ****ed off the 'native paly' that filled up a big chunk of the inside of the tank (came with my LR and has grown prodigiously), and then that nuked the tank.
In the future, I'm going to be much more careful with how I handle dosing of any sort, even Kalk. (Kalk in fact is the only thing I've dosed this year)
I'm also going to try and be a little less crazy with biomass, even if it's 90% coral/hitchhiker inverts (bristles, stars, etc)
My macro seems kinda happy, so there's that. I'll post pics soon. Ammonia spiked again, but the smell has disappated. I'm hoping that some of the coral might survive, and plan another big WC/prime dose on Saturday.
Thanks for all your help RC throughout this whole process. I'll post more when I decide what to do next. I was thinking about rescaping the tank, so at least I can do that without worrying about messing up the SPS.
Now to figure out if the fact that my eyes/contacts are on fire has something to do with lime, salt, palytoxin, or just allergies. Good times
