So since my last big update I had been marginally keeping the tank running, a few times over the summer I had tried to put some SPS frags in the tank, and they looked great for the first week or so. But then in a few weeks they start to brown out, bleach, polyps retract and eventually RTN one day. LPS would start out great and by about the 3rd week they don't show as much polyp extension, eventually retract and receded only to die maybe a month later.
Three months ago I was getting ready to just rip everything out, bleach the whole system and start again.
Then after speaking with a few friends who had remarkably similar issues with their coral when carbon dosing, I decided to stop carbon dosing and using GFO. I also decided to switch salt. I had been using Oceanic for something like ten years, but for some reason the last year or so, the animals didn't look better after a water change, they looked a little worse. Corals just seemed a little more retracted from what they had been in the past. I changed my salt to Red Sea Coral Pro.
So I pulled off the doser and did a few water changes and low and behold things looked better. Polyps were out a little more.
So at this point encouraged by the first glimmer of hope, I go all out. I start performing water changes twice a day for the first two days and then every day for a week. I was making so much ro/di water I killed my RO module in the middle of it and had to buy all new DI resin and a new RO filter. So after I changed out about 450 gallons of water, then I dropped back to twice weekly water changes and now I am doing once a week. Boom! tank looks great. I now have about 10 SPS frags and 3 LPS they all seem to be doing good. It's been over two months with a few frags and they are recovering pretty well.
OK enough about my troubles. Hopefully from here out it's back to normal.
So here are a few shots of the tank as yesterday. Even though there are only a few frags in it right now, the tank looks pretty good. The sand and rocks look better than they have, maybe ever. All the rock is new since the last time I posted pictures, I had a mix of Fiji and Tonga branch. This rock is all Marco Rock.
FTS with the new rock and aquascaping, there are lots of caves and openings for fish to swim through, I think it's a keeper.
Zoanthids, they all doing great, trying to keep them separate from everything else though, a few have got loose and are growing on the main rock work, so I'll have to rip them off at some point.
I'm actually very happy I was able to clean this up.
