<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=15319021#post15319021 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by macclellan
I'm curious to know what was in the eardrops and why you think they are the culprit. In the name of science, leave one tank with the old rock as a control to see whether the others improve. 
Tuberiousjones has lots of cured LR for $2/#. That's cheaper than dry rock from BRS and no shipping $...
It's a long explanation.
The following is copied from a couple of my posts on "that other site."
I just had a really horrible, evil thought.
To explain this, I have to go all the way back to when I had my 16g set up.
When I first started it up, it did great.
The rock was already cycled from another system, and my corals looked and did great.
A couple of months after I got it going, my 10g Prop Tank crashed cause my 2 yr. old dosed it with garlic based eardrops. (garlic, alcohol, DI water for ingredients)
When that happened, I had to move everything that survived into my 16g tank.
After that, the 16g started to have problems.
I assumed it was just having a problem adjusting to my adding all that stuff at once, and also adding 2 fish fairly closely together.
I tried to do things to correct what was going on, but a lot of my time and attention was also taken up by trying to help my family (as well as myself) adjust to my niece Ashley's death.
I also assumed that a lot of the problems I was seeing in the 16g could be attributed to the bad temp swings and high temps I had as a result of the MH lighting over the tank.
Then I moved everything into the 20L and switched to T5HO lighting.
This totally took care of the temp related issues, and everything did well in there at first too.
After a couple of months, I started seeing problems again and that was when I started trying to eliminate everything that could be a source of the problems.
Corals were consistently unhappy and I couldn't figure out why.
Frogspawn lost color and would only expand/puff up about halfway, some zoas were unhappy and would only open halfway, stuff like that.
War coral even lost tissue and started to die in one spot.
Temps were stable, Alk, Ca and Mg were stable, salinity was stable with no swings.
Eliminated source water, heater, skimmer, salt mix, refractometer calibration as sources of the problem.
Lighting and the Vortech are the only things I didn't eliminate.
When I moved everything from the 20L into the new 30g setup, I had about 14-14.5 gallons of actual water to move from the old system, and had to add 10-11 gallons of new water.
When I did this, everything finally started to look better for the first time in months.
Frogspawn wasn't opening all the way, but it was MUCH more inflated than I had seen in a while, Zoas were opening all the way, everything was improving.
When I first moved everything over, I didn't have enough water made up to fill the tank all the way and my waterline wasn't high enough for where I wanted to place the Vortech MP20, so I just used a Koralia 1 for circulation in the display.
After I filled it up all the way, I continued to use the K1 for display circulation for about a week, and added an MJ900 to return water from behind the False Wall.
I had also been using a cheapo 48w T5 fixture for light until I got my 4x39w retro moved over into the canopy for the new system.
Everything was still opening up good at this point.
A few days later, moved the 4x39w T5HO retro into the canopy, all corals still looked happy and didn't seem to have any negative reaction to the change in light.
A few days after this, I moved the MP20 into the new setup, and almost immediately saw a negative reaction in the corals.
Frogspawn shrunk back up, other corals started to partially close again.
Waited a few days to make sure it wasn't just the corals readjusting to the different, increased flow.
No change.
Tried different settings and different flow volumes on the Vortech.
No change.
I had noticed before that whatever was going on appeared to be something contaminating my water.
I would do a 20% WC and for about 2-3 hrs everything would look happier.
After that, the corals reverted to their previously unhappy condition.
This makes me think that something was leaching some kind of contaminant into the water.
What if all of the problems I have been having have been caused by those stupid eardrops absorbing into the LR, and then leaching out into every subsequent system I've put the LR in?
The only other thing I can come up with is that one of the components of the Wet Side of my MP20 is leaching something into the water.
Ecotech is replacing all old parts on it and running diagnostic tests on it so that will be addressed, but I still have to figure this out.
The other possibility is that the LR really is leaching something into the water, and the Vortech accelerates the process because it is so efficient at circulating water through every single part of the tank.
Sorry for the novel, but you asked.
