Another acropora advice thread

Also...on the dipping. After talking with another big time sps keeper here on the forum, it occurs to me that I should be dipping more. I don't have a quarantine setup unfortunately, nor do I have the space for one, but I should really be dipping more than once. I will begin a 6 week or so regiment of frag rack observation time and dip all new specimens several times over the course of some weeks rather than just once at introduction
 
I've switched over to tapatalk a month or so ago and haven't been getting notifications for my threads on here. Anyhow. Not much new to report. Still mostly a lost cause on this tank. There are 2-3 acropora that seem to do ok. Not much growth, but so-so color and PE and I keep going through a cycle of brief growth, followed by STN, trim, remount, grow, stn, trim re-mount, ect...

I have stopped spending any money on acropora. I haven't purchased or added any new ones in several months nor do I plan to. I still suspect either a pest or some sort of non-testable contaminant that will likely either plague the tank forever, or until they're all gone and I go fallow for several months. I have offered all of my acropora to locals in trade but nobody has anything good.

It's a bummer and has caused me to lose significant interest in the tank and hobby in general. I sold my metal halides and went with some leds since I was unable to really take adavantage of the metal halides for their acropora growth. Montipora and zoas seem to be fairly indifferent. Oh well. Once day several years down the road when we move I'll likely sell off the entire tank and start totally fresh and new with mostly new equipment and all and give it another try. I've kind of been focusing on other hobbies due to acro troubles. Even turned off my dosers and stopped testing/water changes.
 
I don't think it's been mentioned but to me it looks like a lack of flow and with all the algae on the rocks I think your PO4 is higher than your test kit is reporting.
 
It hasn't been mentioned. But I'm not low on flow. That I am certain of. Nor have I been. The red turf algae seems to always be there no matter what. I never felt it was worth running a bunch of gfo and stunting/killing my Zoas and Lps just to make the rocks bleach white again. I hear more often that tanks deficient in po4 that run lots of gfo have stn problems than tanks with a little higher inorganics with some algae going. The red turf was introduced by some of the big time acro growers on my reef club who don't seem to have any trouble
 
From the photos it seems your inorganic phosphates are high.
If you have not totally given up yet, please increase your water significantly. And try different methods of phosphate reduction like growing macro algae in refugium and running gfo in reactors.
All your frags have too much algae. Thats means high light, low flow and high nutrients.
 
Maybe it's a funk but I have more or less given up. Just don't have time to take the tank down and start over. I do have a phosban reactor laying around as well as 2 gallons of unused gfo. Maybe if I get around to it I'll load it up and run a little and see what happens.
 
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