About ready to throw in the towel

Have you tested your new SW mix?
Are you running a RO/DI?
How do you top off?
Do you dose?
If your Po4 is at 0.25, what is your No3 at?
What do you feed and how frequently?
 
Which Po4 test kit are you using? I know API's first increments are 0 - .25 and is not very reliable. I know because I was using API and found out the hard way. I was recommended here to get a Hanna Checker and wow what a difference.
 
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cheato use would be too slow to remove the po4. get some lanthium chloride. a drop of it in your ato will drop you po4 fast. carbon dosing take time as well
 
Plus one on testing your top off water and fresh saltwater. I had high phosphates in both and was causing most of my issues. I increased my water changes which fueled the problem and I was wondering why things were getting worst. I could only find the problem with a phosphate meter. My test kits did not show it.

Also you don't want to change your PO4 quickly. If you do it has caused corals to recede or rtn.
 
Agreed... I picked up a nice large sandwich baggie of Chaeto, spread that in the sump, and went back to my LED bulb in the fuge... Hoping that will help chew up some of the excess phosphates.

I also noticed my salinity dropped to 1.024, so I am mixing some high level saltwater, and will slowly drip it in via an aqualifter.

I really don't want to throw in the towel, but just it gets frustrating sometimes. Thanks everyone. This is like a support group.
 
Agreed... I picked up a nice large sandwich baggie of Chaeto, spread that in the sump, and went back to my LED bulb in the fuge... Hoping that will help chew up some of the excess phosphates.

I also noticed my salinity dropped to 1.024, so I am mixing some high level saltwater, and will slowly drip it in via an aqualifter.

I really don't want to throw in the towel, but just it gets frustrating sometimes. Thanks everyone. This is like a support group.

Just remember this hobby takes patience and time nothing happens over night go slow and try not to chase numbers when growing coral. Let nature take it's course and everything will work out fine... Good Luck and I hope everything get's back to normal....

Happy Reefing.... :thumbsup:
 
I went through these frustations earlier this year. No matter what I did nothing seemed to help. I was making everything to complicated. KISS (keep it simple stupid) worked for me. I went to bigger water changes, replaced my RODI filters and invested in some Hanna checkers. I even dumped using the expensive salt mixes and am using IO. Everything has slowly slipped back into place and working. I have a 200g system and was doing 20-30% weekly water changes for about 2 months strait and monitored my basic levels. I was blaming everything but was blinded to what I should really be doing. Just my 2 cents. Also siphon as much of the cyno out too.
 
Yikes! Sorry to hear! I wish I could help. Any chance you know someone competent AND trust them, with an aged AND stable system, to take the gigs to get the tank balanced again with out them in it? Slim chance, but worth a mention. I know they don't like being moved, but it may be better than total heart break. Just a thought. Sorry to hear, been there and know how it feels...




i feel you i want to throw in the towel without the problems.

Seems like that same bug is going around - you aren't alone. Once kids consume all your time, there's no time to wipe... the glASS...
 
In the insanity here, I was worried the gigs weren't doing well but they're fine. The thing that is keeping me going is the Gigs, I just love these animals... They went through not just 1-2" of uncured rock, they went through 150# of it.. Gigs don't seem to care much about whatever is happening in this tank.

The reason I was concerned honestly, was my purple gig looked odd, and after a few days of looking weird, and becoming more like an tall oval than a round circle, I can see the huge bald areas where there were no tentacles are now growing nubs.. So now that he has colored up, looks like he's growing new tents...

So, no worries, Gigs should be just fine... my couple of little chalices, not so much.

Yikes! Sorry to hear! I wish I could help. Any chance you know someone competent AND trust them, with an aged AND stable system, to take the gigs to get the tank balanced again with out them in it? Slim chance, but worth a mention. I know they don't like being moved, but it may be better than total heart break. Just a thought. Sorry to hear, been there and know how it feels...






Seems like that same bug is going around - you aren't alone. Once kids consume all your time, there's no time to wipe... the glASS...
 
Lots of variables from what it seems I had a very similar issue and it drove me nuts lower your temp 76-79 add chaeto to your fugue but have a light growing it do a water change with known good salt when adding chaeto you cannot run carbon being as carbon removes the nutrients that the chaeto(algae) needs to survive cover the slime algae with your current sand cutting oxygen from the red slime is key it is aerobic lack of oxygen will kill it off and last but not least always have thoroughly clean hands and arms as this can also begin cycles do all of these things and it will be under control but you must have patients
 
Oh forgot two more more things up to date lighting with good lighting run times (10k 7 hrs)
And sufficient flow as well both of these very important
 
Careful with scrubbing the algae off the rocks because this can also lead to a cycle
Have a good cleanup crew (monster turbos)
 
Water changes seem to aggravate the situation...

I will bet money it's your RODI... when was the last time you changed your filters?

I'll try to make this short, but your situation sounds very similar to a situation I was having with my parents' tank (I do the maintenance on it, and it's identical to my system at home).

Things would be running great, and then out of the blue things would go down hill fast. I was chasing everything... blaming bulbs, rocks leaching phosphates, looking for stray current, chasing parameters... everything I could think of. Of course I resorted to more frequent water changes trying to get everything to stabilize, but things would steadily get worse.

Over the course of 5 years, this happened about twice per year, but I could always get things going again. The problem was that I was changing so many things at once, that I could never zero-in what the actual problem was. And, it was pointless to even try to keep SPS. We would add them while things were looking good, and then the decline would begin again and cover everything with cyano a few months later. The only thing that did well were the anemone, the fish, and a few easy to keep corals.

Even though I was always producing 000 TDS water, I eventually became skeptical of the RODI (started seeing a pattern of things getting better about 2 months after a filter change). It turns out that's exactly what the problem was... specifically the carbon filter. I went from changing the carbon filter every 6 months to every 3 months, and things have been great for about 2 years now (knock on wood). I could go into even more detail here, but something in my parents' local water was getting past their RODI even though they were always producing 000 TDS water.
 
I will bet money it's your RODI... when was the last time you changed your filters?

I'll try to make this short, but your situation sounds very similar to a situation I was having with my parents' tank (I do the maintenance on it, and it's identical to my system at home).

Things would be running great, and then out of the blue things would go down hill fast. I was chasing everything... blaming bulbs, rocks leaching phosphates, looking for stray current, chasing parameters... everything I could think of. Of course I resorted to more frequent water changes trying to get everything to stabilize, but things would steadily get worse.

Over the course of 5 years, this happened about twice per year, but I could always get things going again. The problem was that I was changing so many things at once, that I could never zero-in what the actual problem was. And, it was pointless to even try to keep SPS. We would add them while things were looking good, and then the decline would begin again and cover everything with cyano a few months later. The only thing that did well were the anemone, the fish, and a few easy to keep corals.

Even though I was always producing 000 TDS water, I eventually became skeptical of the RODI (started seeing a pattern of things getting better about 2 months after a filter change). It turns out that's exactly what the problem was... specifically the carbon filter. I went from changing the carbon filter every 6 months to every 3 months, and things have been great for about 2 years now (knock on wood). I could go into even more detail here, but something in my parents' local water was getting past their RODI even though they were always producing 000 TDS water.

Already suspected that, and just changed sediment filter, and carbon filters the other week.... Water always tested 0tds through it all. I had bought replacement filters, but just never used them, so it has been probably 20-25G of ATO water now, and it's getting BETTER......

call me crazy, but on my right overflow, on the bottom where there are those little grates, I was able to track when this nasty cycle and cyano was coming to a close.. There would initially be cyano and a red film on those teeth in the grate, and it would gradually dissapear as the cycle was dying. The other day it was about 90% gone, looked today, there's almost no sign of it.. I'm thinking this might be coming to a head here shortly.. I'm still going to add some more LR in my sump to help with the bacteria load, don't think it will hurt.

So if the inline TDS meter can't be trusted, why the heck even bother?! If that's the case.... argh.


Here are some updated pictures so you can see what I'm talking about. You can see in some of these pictures, the bottom little part of the rock is not as dark as the rest of the rock.. That was the rock that was undisturbed for months under the sand bed... when I moved the rock, that was exposed, and kicked this whole thing off.

IMG_2464.JPG


IMG_2465.JPG


IMG_2466.JPG


IMG_2467.JPG


Overall, the rock is clean now, no cyano, just the couple spots in the sand!

IMG_2472.JPG
 
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So if the inline TDS meter can't be trusted, why the heck even bother?! If that's the case.... argh.

Here are some updated pictures so you can see what I'm talking about. You can see in some of these pictures, the bottom little part of the rock is not as dark as the rest of the rock.. That was the rock that was undisturbed for months under the sand bed... when I moved the rock, that was exposed, and kicked this whole thing off.
According to SpectraPure, the inline TDS meters are only good for relative measurement and shouldn't be used to monitor final output. See post #9 of this thread...
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1020296

I'm not so sure that moving the rock caused this. I'm guessing that the problem was caused by a buildup of something getting past your RODI, but who knows. Just out of curiosity, how long before the problems started did you perform your last water change?

Also, here are more details of what I was going through...
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2093024
 
According to SpectraPure, the inline TDS meters are only good for relative measurement and shouldn't be used to monitor final output. See post #9 of this thread...
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1020296

I'm not so sure that moving the rock caused this. I'm guessing that the problem was caused by a buildup of something getting past your RODI, but who knows. Just out of curiosity, how long before the problems started did you perform your last water change?

Also, here are more details of what I was going through...
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2093024


Several weeks, when things stabilized I was doing about 15-20G every 2-3 weeks as necessary.. So I changed the RO filters probably a week or so ago...it's gotten better since then....
 
It was usually a few weeks after a water change that I would see things starting to down hill... a bit of cyano forming, less PE on SPS, things just didn't look great. So, I would do what anyone would do and perform another water change... unknowingly making things worse. It's almost like at some point, I did the water change that "broke the camels back". More cyano world form, SPS would start to lose tissue, and I would continue to do water changes while trying to figure out what the problem was. Eventually, it would come time to change the RODI filters (as normally scheduled), but since good things happen so slowly in this hobby, it took me awhile to figure out that the filter change was solving the problem.
 
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