DragonFish
Unregistered Member
I am having some problems getting my SPS to color up. First some history and tank info. The tank is an oceanic 33 cube tank with no sump. I am running a Remora hang on skimmer that doesn't really seem to pull out very much. I have a SEIO 620 and 820 for circulation and my light is a 150w JBJ Viper HQI that I hated until I put an XM 20K bulb in it. Now it is very bright and great color. I first added a small brown monti and let it go for about a month before I tried anything else. I saw nice growth and great PE from it. About three months ago I added a pink birdsnest, purple monti digitata, orange monti cap and a blue tort frag. Within 24 hours all the SPS were the same drab brownish except the cap, but even that lost a lot of its color. I dig some research and found that my PO4 was way too high at .5 so I started running Phosban. Once it got down to .04 I waited a few weeks and didn't see the slightest difference in my SPS. I really only feed my fish sparingly so I started feeding them a good amount of frozen brine every day and started using DTs Oyster eggs daily as well. I've been doing that for a couple weeks too and although all my softies are looking spectacular the SPS are still brown. They are all growing and I have nice polyp extension but just no color at all. Well I guess brown is a color. My calcium level is stable at 400-420 ppm and my magnesium is right around 1200. My alk seems a bit low at 2-2.5 meg/l but I'm working on that as well. The only thing I can think of is my nitrates are around 10-15 all the time. I don't have a sand bed, instead my wife got me this shell substrate so it isn't quite sand and it isn't quite BB either. I run every thing hang on and just don't have room for a hang on fuge. What else can I do to get my nitrates down and is that really whats causing my problem? What else do I need to be looking at? Thanks!
