80g SPS dominated issues

[raultsu]

any updates?

 

[callmesaul8889]

BTW pH is an odd animal, you would think more air would decrease pH due to atmospheric CO2 being infused into the water column. But I digress, I gave up chasing a specific pH years ago haha.

My airline is pulling air from outside my house for the specific reason of keeping my pH on the higher side. If I turn my skimmer off, my pH will drop as low as 7.8. We have a pretty tightly sealed house and run our A/C heavily. The Florida summer heat doesn't go well with open windows.

Update:

It's been about 2 weeks since I turned my lights back on after a 3 day light out period. After the lights out period, I did 2 back-to-back 30g water changes. I sucked out as much cyano as possible during the water changes.

Since then, NO3 has held steady at 2ppm. I replaced my phosphate media after getting new hanna reagents. For the past 4 days, phosphate has been 0.00ppm (that's 0ppb phosphorus on the ULR test). I turned off the reactor for the time being as I noticed slightly less polyp extension. I'm targeting 0.02ppm.

Lighting still is a major concern for me. I'm ramping back up after the lights out, but I still can't seem to raise the PAR over 100 without noticing some of the coral turning whiter on the tops, notably a small frag of psammocora. Currently I have 4 T5 bulbs at 56% each. 3 blue+ and 1 coral+.

Unfortunately, I'm starting to see a dusting of brownish red on the sand again. It looks exactly like the beginnings of cyano. It doesn't seem to be getting much worse, but I'm feeding sparingly to try not to fuel it. I'm not dosing Fuel or anything at the moment, just feeding a pinky-nail sized piece of frozen food nightly.

Params:
NO3 - 2ppm
PO4 - 0.00ppm
Cal - 420ppm
Alk - 8.0dKh (a little low, bringing it back to 8.3)
pH - 8.05 at night to 8.22 mid day
Mag - 1260ppm (also bringing this up to 1350)
Temp - 77 at night to 79 mid day

 

[callmesaul8889]

Got a quick vid of the light intensity and (kinda) showing the dusting on the sand: https://vid.me/cTGL

 

[bertoni]

I can't get very much of the video to play, but the tank looks nice enough for a new system. I'm not sure what kind of substrate you're using, so I can't tell what might be wrong.

 

[Orcus Varuna]

I can't get very much of the video to play, but the tank looks nice enough for a new system. I'm not sure what kind of substrate you're using, so I can't tell what might be wrong.

If your pulling it up from the tapatalk ios app you have to click done on the full screen video, which pulls you out to a website where you click resume. It will then show you a quick ad followed by the rest of the video!

As for the tank it looks good, I personally would ramp back up to normal over the next few weeks and monitor the cyano and vacuum it a few times a week. Remember you killed the bad algae but the nutrients which caused it are still there. Since I killed my outbreak of chrysophtes at the end of May my nutrient issue has manifested itself in two additional outbreaks, first diatoms & cyano then GHA. Only now is it starting to die off by mowing the lawn at least twice a week. I'm hoping that once the gha dies the rocks will have leeched everything out and the system will really begin to stabilize.

As an aside, I view fixing these issues as pointing the tank in the right direction. By killing the chrysophtes you did this and now your tank is going to over correct to something else and so on. Overtime however the swings will get less and the tank will mature. Those dang Chrysophtes though were not normal I have never really encountered anything like them. I'll take vacuuming cyano and ripping out clumps of GHA any day!


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[callmesaul8889]

Here's a youtube link in case vid.me isn't working well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50GrEhclUnc

As for the tank it looks good, I personally would ramp back up to normal over the next few weeks and monitor the cyano and vacuum it a few times a week.

So here's the thing, I've never had my lights at a normal intensity. I have the dimmable 8x54w ATI fixture and I had to remove all but 4 bulbs as I was bleaching everything that I introduced to the tank. I've been slowly trying to bring the lights back up to normal levels for SPS, but every time I increase lighting I get poor response from the coral and the algae gets worse.

How should I go about increasing the lights? At some point I need to add more bulbs back in. I'm currently increasing them 1-2% twice a week, and today I saw that my jedi mind trick's polyps were clenched (yesterday I increased from 54% to 56% on all channels).

When you say vacuum a few times a week, are you suggesting water changes or simply siphoning and running through a canister filter? BTW, my roommate is from Punta Gorda! Thought that was pretty interesting!

 

[callmesaul8889]

I can't get very much of the video to play, but the tank looks nice enough for a new system. I'm not sure what kind of substrate you're using, so I can't tell what might be wrong.

Special grade aragonite. I got the larger grain since I was aiming for SPS dominated.

Both of my larger wrasse kick up sand pretty regularly. I was thinking about lightening the bioload and getting rid of them. I'm not sure how much the sand is irritating the coral.

 

[bertoni]

The Youtube link works for me. As far as ramping up the lighting, you might need to give the corals some time to adjust, or the issue might be the algae. Spending a few minutes a week vacuuming out as much of the slime as possible might help export nutrients.

 

[callmesaul8889]

The Youtube link works for me. As far as ramping up the lighting, you might need to give the corals some time to adjust, or the issue might be the algae. Spending a few minutes a week vacuuming out as much of the slime as possible might help export nutrients.

Okay, yeah I realize now that I was only giving the coral 3-4 days before changing the light intensity again (even though it was a minor increase). I'll ramp up slower.

As for vacuuming, can I use a canister filter to catch the cyano from the sand, or should I siphon and replace the water with freshly mixed water? The sand kinda turns into a crust on the surface, so I end up sucking out the top layer of sand instead of just the cyano.

 

[Galizio]

Could just be a diatom bloom? (The brown stuff on top of the sand bed)


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[callmesaul8889]

Could just be a diatom bloom? (The brown stuff on top of the sand bed)


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It looks like diatoms, but when it gets worse it turns red and is very clearly cyano. It's been consistently getting worse during the day, and then disappearing overnight.

 

[Scrubber_steve]

for what its worth I can't see zero nitrates being the problem.

Remember that on natural coral reefs your home test kit would also read zero NO3.

And there'll always be traces of ammonium nitrate nitrate in the water, unless your fish don't poop, and these traces of nitrogen products should be more than enough for the zooxanthella in your corals to be happy.

If you believe you have a strong bacteria count in your system, & you are using a decent GAC, your DOC level should be low, overall, if anything.

If I was you I would slowly increase the light intensity & maybe change the spectrum to see the result.

Maybe try a different salt mix?

 

[bertoni]

If the film disappears overnight, I'd suspect dinoflagellates, but it might be cyanobacteria.

I'd use a siphon to remove the sand and then ditch the water. You can let the sand settles and dump it back into the system later, if that's not too much work, or you could siphon into a filter bag and work from there.

 

[callmesaul8889]

I'm wary of increasing the light intensity any more for the time being, some coral is looking more pale today. I don't know what spectrum I would need to change, blue+ and coral+ seems to be a pretty common combo.

I tried to take a few shots of the true color of the coral as best as possible. This is as close to what everything naturally looks like as possible: https://imgur.com/a/VZ6xe

This is my 3rd year straight with a tank that has pale sps that never grow from frags with a light that has to be run at less than 50% intensity. I've got to be doing something majorly wrong.

 

[bertoni]

I suspect that the tank needs more live rock for filtration, but that's hard to prove.

 

[callmesaul8889]

I suspect that the tank needs more live rock for filtration, but that's hard to prove.

That very well could be it. I started the tank with 55lbs of dry Walt Smith reef rock. I ended up removing 2 larger pieces as they didn't fit with the aquascape very well and they ended up trapping a ton of detritus in the refugium section of the sump, so they're out of the tank completely now. I'm well under the 1lb per gallon rule, but the rock is very light and porous compared to any dry rock I've ever had before.

I could either: lighten the fish bioload, add more rock (I really like the minimal rock scape), or try a bio media like Sachem Matrix. I'm leaning towards lightening the bioload by removing the two larger wrasse (melanarus) as they both kick up a ton of sand and fight from time to time.

There shouldn't be any negatives to adding bio media like Matrix in a mesh bag, right?

 

[bertoni]

Matrix probably works well enough as long as water is forced through it at a reasonable rate, for some value of "reasonable". I would worry a bit about collecting debris, as well, though. It's a fine product, in any case.

 

[callmesaul8889]

I've added 1L of Matrix seeded with Prodibio to boost the beneficial bacteria. I'll be adding the remaining Prodibio vials over the next few weeks until I run out.

One thing that just came to mind is my skimmer; it's anything but "set it and forget it". After every water change, my skimmer overflows. I don't have giant bubbles of gunk, just yellowish skimmate and a tiny range of error when it comes to adjusting. Too low and I get a completely dry collection cup. A bit too high and I get yellow water and the chance for an overflow just from looking at it the wrong way.

I don't really see my skimmer helping with nutrient export, but I have nuisance algae and corals that appear to be lacking nutrients. This has me scratching my head. The skimmer is a Reef Octopus (I've seen a couple claims that they overflow a lot) and I'm wondering if I should invest in a better skimmer. Opinions?

 

[bertoni]

Do you use any kind of water conditioner or additive when mixing saltwater? It's strange to have a skimmer overflow like that. I don't know how good the Reef Octopus is, but you could ask in the equipment forum. There's very little data on skimmer performance.

Even if the skimmer isn't removing organics, as long as the bubbles are in good shape, it's providing oxygenation, which can be very handy.

 

[callmesaul8889]

I only use small amounts of Prime in my top off water. My area uses chloramine in the water and I honestly don't trust my RO/DI unit to remove all of the chloramine.

I buy my mixed saltwater from a LFS. I can double check the next time I'm in, but they've said before that it's regular Red Sea salt and their 0tds RO/DI water measured with a Milwaukee meter.

I definitely see a difference in pH when my skimmer is on vs when it's off. Before I ran the skimmer airline outside, pH was between 7.8 and 8.1. Since I ran the line outside, I'm seeing pH between 8.05 and 8.25.