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07/14/2013, 05:13 PM | #1 |
Registered Member
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Austin, TX
Posts: 1,003
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Alk spike = acontia/stress?
Hey guys, so it's two weeks since the move. Everything looked good after the move. Great polyp extension, etc. Although things were brown.
There are no LFS here to sell RO/DI and I had been too busy to source RO/DI... So I put in fresh GFO and used Target sealed gallon bottles of distilled water. I figured things would be ok, but the last few days have been slight bacterial blooms/cloudiness, then today, when the topoff water ran out, things cleared up. Everything had faded overnight almost. At least two small frags have a small patch of recession (not RTN), Tort has burnt tips with tissue loss, I had been keeping my alkalinity at 6-7 dKH, today I measured it at 12 dKH... uhh, holy crap. That swing has probably happened in about 48-72 hours. So I decided to take a chance with my probe and measure the distilled water, seeing if there was any buffering capacity to it... pH of 8, but unstable (7.95 to 8.5), as you might expect for distilled. I've been using Target brand distilled on my orchid tank for years. Only thing I can think of is a new evaporation rate (which I didn't observe carefully) at my new place, is causing me to dump in way to much kalkwasser way too fast every day, and the bloom is likely CaCO3 precip. No noticeable change in skimmate production. Phosphate has been right around 0.07 ppm using Hanna ULM, so GFO hasn't tanked it. GFO hasn't even reduced it according to the Hanna meter. The burnt tips are only on a single coral and are pretty diagnostic in my experience for an alk swing or spike, but I've never seen multiple colonies produce acontia. How about you all? To me all my symptoms seem pretty well explained by an alk spike. |
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