Another pale sps thread...

[Patzig]

I have been dosing around 15 ml of vinegar in a 40g breeder + 20g sump system for a while now. My lights are a diy combo of cree led's and t5's. I currently only run 2-part brs dosing, heavily skim, no filter sock, no gfo, and no gac. I lightly dose oyster feast, zeo sponge power, pohl's xtra and coral vitalizer. I am testing around 0.00-0.02 po4 with hanna, and 0 no3 with salifert. I believe I am at the point where I must rely on nuisance algae and coloration of sps coral to tell me if my balance of no3, po4 and available food in the water are correct. Some of my sps (mostly acro's) have been pale and very slow growers for around 4 months now. Most of my corals are all still frags also. So I've been trying to increase feedings (to bring colors and growth up), while keeping no3 and po4 in check to keep brown algae (mostly on glass) down to a minimum. As I have increased feeding, I have noticed much more brown algae growth on all glass(expected). I have also noticed that some of my sps have slightly browned out (I guess this is a step in the right direction to achieve better colors, since they were very pale before). Lastly, I have lowered the intensity of my led's to help fight pale colors in corals. My questions:

1. When carbon dosing...is it necessary to run gac with it?
2. As I have increased feedings, should I just keeping raising vinegar dosage until algae growth is slowed down/eliminated?
3. Would running gfo be a better or more controlled way to keep po4 in check?
4. Now that I have lowered my par from leds and achieved some brown in the sps, should I start to raise the current on the leds?

Thank you

 

[Patzig]

Some more specifics:

-40g breeder + 20g sump
-bb and around 40# total of pukani rock
-Precision Marine RL100 skimmer
-used to run chaeto, but it all turned white and died
-used to run gfo/gac in one reactor, but got fed up with trying to keep the flow consistent, so i switched to vinegar dosing.
-only sps, around 20 frags and 5 small colonies
-4 chromis, 1 clown, 2 yellow coris wrasse - all around 1.5 inches long
-lights = 2 x 24" ati blue plus tubes and 40 (mix of cree 3w royal blue, blue, violet, and neutral white) leds, no lenses, all driven around 400 mA. Run for 7 total hours with 1 hour of sunrise and sunset each.
-10 gallon wc every 2 weeks. IO reef crystals

alk = ~7
cal = ~450
mag = ~1300
no3 = 0
po4 = 0.00-0.02

dose:
vinegar - 15 ml daily
coral vitalizer - 2 drops daily
sponge power - 2 drops daily
pohls xtra - 1 ml every other day
b-balance - 1 ml every other day
oyster feast - 1 tsp daily
rods food - around 1 tbsp daily

 

[Bugger]

Why would you lower the light outpput this actually is starve and not helping. the zoo's growing in the coral are what keeps you corals healthy. so you have to make them happy. I'd strongly recomend that you increase the no3 to 1ppm or even two ppm. to give your coral the extra food for growth. ofcoaurse more stuff grows on the tank wall when feeding without using gac

 

[Patzig]

I originally lowered them because I felt like the leds had bleached some sps. So I should increase feeding even more to get some no3 in the tank? And then possibly increase vinegar dose and add gac?

 

[franklypre]

I didn't think the Pohls was a daily dosing product, I would slow down the dosing to every other day on most of those products and feed the fish a little more. I would also suggest testing the calibration of your salinity tester, sounds silly but it can lead to these types of situations. Pics will help

 

[Patzig]

I test salinity with a refractometer that I calibrate with my own near 0 tds ro water, so i think I'm ok on salinity.

green millepora

red digitata

setosa

ora green birdsnest

pink birdsnest

pearlberry

 

[franklypre]

Honestly refracto's are consistently off when tested with Ro IME, There is a DIY calibration solution that would double check it and eliminate a simple solution, Pinpoint seems to be fairly accurate as well. Other than that I would be inclined to lower intensity or duration of the lights.

 

[MHG]

I saw on the guide for Pohls to use up to 2 drops for every 25 gal of cv daily. I did that and increased my potassium and noticed an improvement in one week. Test for potassium though.... I was doing the 1 ml thing and based on tests upped it to 15 ml....

 

[Gumma 1]

This tank looks young.Just give it some time and slowly increase nutrients.More fish,more food.

 

[pstank1]

This tank looks young.Just give it some time and slowly increase nutrients.More fish,more food.

It looks very young, no coraline growth on the rocks, no algae at all on the rocks. How long has the tank been set up?

 

[Logzor]

I am thinking that the vinegar might be doing too good of a job, pulling away too much nutrition from your corals. Consider discontinuing the vinegar dosing.

As far as coraline goes, I know that when my salinity was too high I had ZERO coraline growth. Definitely invest in some calibration solution...but get two brands. I've received two bad bottles of PinPoint brand solution, as you can imagine, it screwed me up big time. I ended up making my own solution (by adding 1/2 cup of salt to a gallon of water) just to make sure I'm in the ballpark (depending on your salt, this should read like 1.024 or so).

 

[Patzig]

Thank you for the input. The tank has been set up for 9 months. I believe my rocks look very "white" and have little algae growth because I bought dry pukani rock from brs. I also cured it with lanthanum chloride before I set up the tank. Many people have reported that after fully nuking any rock with lanthanum chloride, it takes a while for algaes and sponges to get established on it.

I bought a few new test kits and got these numbers:

NO3 - 0.0 (salifert)
PO4 - 0.00 (hanna)
Potassium - 380 (salifert's new kit...it's really accurate and easy from what I can tell)

So, I understand that any growing algae (mainly brown algae on glass for me) can skew my PO4 readings. But the fact that I'm testing a true 0 on Nitrates confuses me. I raised my daily fish feedings about a month ago, and have since noticed MUCH more brown algae growth on glass. I guess it's not terrible, but the algae will re-appear within 2-3 days. So my question is, even though I'm growing a good amount of algae...I need to up my feedings even more? Because my PO4 and NO3 readings are at 0? I can consider cutting out the carbon dosing also...but I feel like then I would REALLY start getting algae growth.