jlinzmaier
Premium Member
I first posed this question in the SPS forum but we went through all the logical thoughts and decided to have you chemistry experts take a crack at it. I'm goign to provide a lot of detail here to try to answer basic questions and provide as much info about my system as I can. Here's the deal:
I've been battling this silly problem for about two years now. If/when I try to raise my alk past 6.5 dkh I seem to seriously irritate my SPS. I get a definitive lack of polyp extension followed by STN throughout areas of the entire corals tissue (not just the base or the tips - tissue begins to recess at all areas of the corals skeleton). My tanks chemistry is very stable except for when I try to adjust alk up or down.
It just makes absolutely no sense to me. I can change absolutely nothing for weeks and things will be fine (with the exception of what I think is relatively slow SPS growth and all but a complete lack of corraline algae growth). As soon as I try increasing the alk level I get complete lack of polyp ext (day and night) and many sps (monti's, acro's, and stylo's) start to develop STN at various areas (base, tips, and throughout the body of the coral). The more I raise the alk the more tissue loss develops and the faster it occurs.
I always make any adjustments very slowly (never more than 0.5 dkh spaced over a 24 hr period and never more than a 1dkh shift in a week. I've tried raising alk by dosing a bit more kalk over several weeks time and still had trouble. I thought maybe the increase in pH was irritating the corals. I then backed it down let the tank recover for about 2 months then I tried raising alk by increasing my ca reactor effluent rate. Once I hit 7 or higher it all goes downhill. I also tried raising alk with soda ash from BRS and got the same effect.
I don't do any carbon source dosing. My ca is stable at 400 and I realize that dosing more kalk or increasing the ca reactor effluent rate will increase ca but not enough to make a detrimental impact of any sort. My mag is always stable at 1300.
I just don't get it. I can tell if my alk is drifting above 6.5dkh because the lack of polyp ext in my monti verrucosa is the first noticed.
Any thoughts on why this would happen?? I have really slow growth in my SPS and many corals haven't grown more than a cm or two over the past 2 years. I also have little to no corraline algae growth and I'm sure they are both related to low alk levels.
I have tested my ELOS kits against two different control solutions from different manufacturers and the kit always read the solution as it's labeled. I've tested with Salifert and get a reading about 1-1.5 dkh higher.
I do notice I seem to get a fair amount of sand clumping in the areas of highest flow. I'm assuming that would be caco3 precipitation because some of the chunks turn completely rock hard. I even had some caco3 precipitation onto my chaeto a few weeks ago????? This seems odd to me that it would occur at alk levels of 6.5-7 dkh. I've never gotten the alk past 7.5 dkh because the corals begin to look so stressed I'm afraid I might kill them if I continue on.
I dose the ca reactor effluent and kalk into my sump (at opposite ends) and it is always mixed into the water nicely before it returns to the display. I dose kalk constantly throughout the day as well as using my ca reactor to keep up with what my kalk can't (don't have a lot of evaporation).
What's completely baffling and very frustrating is that many friends have gotten frags from me and they maintain their alk levels at 9 or 10 dkh and the corals they get from me thrive. In their tanks the corals grow at what I would consider normal or fast and they have spectacular polyp extension.
I can even see coral irritation and lack of polyp extension when I do a small water change with a salt mix like IO or RC which has a high alk level.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!!!
Does anyone else have trouble like this??
I'm almost to the point of having my water sent off to ENC labs to have a full analysis to see if some heavy metals are out of wack and precipitating out onto the corals surface when alk levels rise. That's the only "shot in the dark" guess that I can come up with at this point.
I did dose two part exclusively for about 6 months and the problem still persisted when I tried to raise alk. I tried both sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate thinking that the pH may be the key but both alk supplements of the two part irritated the corals just the same when I tried to raise alk. I've tried every combination of ca/alk supplementation as well as each one individually and always the same response.
Stabiliy. Definately the key factor in SPS general health, growth, and nice polyp ext. I go great lengths to maintain stability. Unless I'm intentionally trying to raise alk (or backing it down after the corals get irritated from the increase) my water params are rock solid. I keep my alk at 6.5 dkh and for the last year I've tested almost daily. I'm able to keep it from shifting at all unless I intenionally experiment with yet another attempt at raising it. I don't try to raise alk levels often but once every couple months I give it a shot with a different method hoping to find the key to letting me maintain my alk level a little higher without stressing the SPS.
My ca is always solid at 400 and mag at 1300. I don't think they've shifted at all in the last year. I don't dose anything to keep mag where it's at, I simply rely on water changes and that has kept it stable.
I had my system set up to do 10 gallon water changes automatically every day but I had a pump go out and for the last month I've been doing about 25 gallons two times a week. I currently use a combination of 50% tropic marin pro reef and 50% instant ocean. I have a system which has a total volume of about 600-700 gallons so a 50% or 100% water change is pretty much out of the question. I have the ability to do a 100 gallon water change at one time and I've done that a few times. A couple times with just tropic marin pro reef, once with instant ocean, and once with a 50% mix of each. The SPS seemed slightly stressed with the water changes using tropic marin. The SPS were very stressed with the 100 gallon change using IO - very likely due to the high alk value of IO salt mix. The 50/50 (tropic marin/IO) water change showed more irritation than the plain tropic marin water change but less than the IO water change (correlating irritation directly to alk values of the salt mixes).
I do have a very low nutrient system. I have little to no nuisance algea growth other than a little derbesia that none of my animals will eat. I run an algea turf scrubber and grow chaeto. I get very little growth on the algea turf scrubber and the chaeto grows at a snails pace. For a while the chaeto was actually dying off. My nitrate was always undetectable and po4 (per hanna photometer) was consistently reading 0.02 or less. With the chaeto dying off I started feeding my fish lots of food trying to get more nutrients into the system. The fish get fed a huge amount now every day and I finally have nitrate detectable at approx 2 and po4 last read at 0.03. The chaeto has stopped dying and is now growing but very slow (still only a slight amount of slime algae on the glass that the builds up so slow I only need to clean the glass every 2 weeks (not because I'm lazy, just because it takes 2 weeks to get enough built up on the glass so I can notice it). I've recently started dosing the ELOS amino acid supplement and their product called pro skimmer which I believe is a DOC/carbohydrate concoction for corals. I thought for a while that my system may be reacting like some do when people are using bacterial proliferation. In those cases (although unclear etiology) the systems must have alk maintained at levels below 8dkh to prevent burnt tips on SPS. Well, I can't even hit 7 without serious irritation! I'm not dosing any carbon sources and the coral tissue loss is at more than just the tips. It was just a thought since my nutrient levels are quite low.
I have a 4 stage RO/DI unit and TDS is always 0 with my inline meters. I have a comTDS-100 which I routinely check my water with (in addition to the inline monitors that I check every time I turn on the RO/DI unit). Once the inline monitors read anything but 0 or my com TDS reads anything greater than 0.7 I change the DI resin and evaluate if the sediment or carbon blocks need to be changed. I take good care of my RO/DI unit.
It was very kind of ostrow to do some reasearch and link to my local water source analysis to see if my source water had high levels of any trace element that could be getting post my RO/DI.
I contacted the person in that report and he is going to get me a full water analysis report next week. He said they are also doing water testing again this year and will send me the full report.
I actually did try just IO salt mix for two months and during that time I didn't try to raise alk levels. I did notice that with each water change, even the small daily 10 gallon water change, the corals seemed irritated and would retract polyps for several hours. The reaction seemed very similar to how they acted when I would try to raise alk so I didn't even bother trying to raise alk while using the IO. It would sure be nice if I could just use IO since it would be so much cheaper. Thank you for the thought!!
Strange problem - yes. Frustrating - absolutely X 10 !!!!
To maintain my alk at 6.5 I dose about 4 gallons per day of fully saturated kalk. My calcium reactor runs at a very slow rate to just pick up what the kalk can't maintain. It's about a drop a second from the effluent line. It's not a lot of ca/alk supplementation but for a 400 gallon tank I don't have it stocked very well and there is virtually no corraline growth. Not to mention there isn't much SPS growth to take up much alk. Wish I had the opposite problem. LOL!! I've got lot's of ways to supplement ca and alk but the tank just doesn't want it.
I think I heard that you're not supposed to run an RO/DI unit after the softener due to the sodium in the water which can be hard on the membrane (I believe that's the concern). I never thought much about it since the TDS is so low to begin with I wasn't worried about overworking my ro unit. Good thought though. I'll pose that question to the chemistry guys.
Lighting is good but not supreme. I have three 400 watt halides on a track going back and forth about 12 inches. It's pretty darn good coverage but I'm going to invest in some LED's and get more fixtures over the tank so I don't have to run a track. Recent PAR readings were approx 350 2-3 inches below the surface (directly under a light), roughly 200 mid tank and about 90-110 on the bottom center with the PAR dropping to about 70's at the far corners.
Flow is probably better than most tanks. I have three hammerhead gold pumps (5,600 gph) on closed loops going through OM 4-ways. I also have a hammerhead gold on the return from the sump in the basement which is valved down a bit so probably 2,000-2,500 gph when you take into account about 15 ft of head pressure. I also plan to add some koralias on a wavemaker for even more random flow. Recently I tried one for a while and noticed my acans puffed up a bit more and seemed happier. With the 3 closed loops and return pump I have about 44X turnover of the display.
I agree with low nutrients causing slow growth. The first 4-5 years of having a reef tank I battled nuisance algea and excess nutrients due to lack of knowledge on proper filtration methods. For the next 18 months I then ran the zeo system and learned what a tank can look like when nutrients are stripped to low (one extreme to the other - LOL!!). Due to the cost and some concerns I had with the zeo process I decided to drop the use of zeo products and used vodka dosing. After some trouble with various bacterial proliferation methods (mainly stripping nutrients to fast and too low) I decided to use conventional methods of filtration and simply monitor the nutrient input into the tank a bit closer. About a year ago I set up this 420 gallon display and have never had trouble with excess nutrients. Since I set this tank up I've had limited nuisance algea growth and limited macro growth (If I don't feed massive amounts of food my macros begin to die). I attribute that to good flow, good skimmer, and having a relatively low fish bioload since this tank has been set up.
With that in mind I had seriously considered that the growth issues with stony corals was related to nutrients being too low. For the last 6 months I've seriously increased the amount of fish in my tank as well as feeding massive amounts of food every day. I have an auto feeder which feeds about 1/2 tsp of food (mixed pellet, flake, cylopeeze, and mixed zooplankton) with each feeding. That feeding is delivered slowly over an hours time 4 times a day. In addition I feed a 2inX2in chunk of rods food (herbivore blend) once daily. With the rods food I also throw in a couple cubes of mysis or brine shrimp. I also feed about a shot glass full of live blackworms every day. The blackworms feeding is usually split up among feeding the fish and target feeding the LPS when the lights go out. I also feed a full sheet of nori every day or every other day. I also feed about 10 algea wafers so my snails and hermits don't starve from the lack of algea growth. 3-4 times a week I feed a 1/4tsp of decapsulated brine shrimp eggs when the lights go out. I've recently started dosing various types of phyto and I use about 3X the recommended dosage. I don't know anyone that feeds that much and has as little nuisance algea growth as I do. My fish are extremely fat and there are no signs of excess nutrients whatsoever. I'm afraid to feed any more because I'm feeding such a large amount already. Even with all that feeding the highest I can get my NO3 to is 2 and po4 up to 0.03???????
A quick thought on the low nutrients. Here's my build thread. This post shows the internal plumbing for the closed loops and how I covered all the PVC with dried rock rubble. I used GE silicone #1 which has been decided as safe by nearly all who have used it for reefs. I used a lot of silicone to glue all that rock to the PVC - roughly 20 tubes. The curing agent in the silicone is acetic acid (vinegar). The silicone was definately all dried before I put water in the tank but I wonder if there is some acetic acid leaching from the silicone and inducing bacterial proliferation as the acetic acid is acting as a carbon source. I would think that since the tank has been running for a full year now that anything that would leach from the silicone would be done, but I guess I can't say that for sure. Just a potential thought on why I have such low nutrients.
If anyone here in the chemistry forum has any other ideas I'd love to hear them. This is very frustrating to say it lightly.
Any thoughts on the RO/DI unit being plumbed in after the water softener??
Thank you!!
Jeremy
I've been battling this silly problem for about two years now. If/when I try to raise my alk past 6.5 dkh I seem to seriously irritate my SPS. I get a definitive lack of polyp extension followed by STN throughout areas of the entire corals tissue (not just the base or the tips - tissue begins to recess at all areas of the corals skeleton). My tanks chemistry is very stable except for when I try to adjust alk up or down.
It just makes absolutely no sense to me. I can change absolutely nothing for weeks and things will be fine (with the exception of what I think is relatively slow SPS growth and all but a complete lack of corraline algae growth). As soon as I try increasing the alk level I get complete lack of polyp ext (day and night) and many sps (monti's, acro's, and stylo's) start to develop STN at various areas (base, tips, and throughout the body of the coral). The more I raise the alk the more tissue loss develops and the faster it occurs.
I always make any adjustments very slowly (never more than 0.5 dkh spaced over a 24 hr period and never more than a 1dkh shift in a week. I've tried raising alk by dosing a bit more kalk over several weeks time and still had trouble. I thought maybe the increase in pH was irritating the corals. I then backed it down let the tank recover for about 2 months then I tried raising alk by increasing my ca reactor effluent rate. Once I hit 7 or higher it all goes downhill. I also tried raising alk with soda ash from BRS and got the same effect.
I don't do any carbon source dosing. My ca is stable at 400 and I realize that dosing more kalk or increasing the ca reactor effluent rate will increase ca but not enough to make a detrimental impact of any sort. My mag is always stable at 1300.
I just don't get it. I can tell if my alk is drifting above 6.5dkh because the lack of polyp ext in my monti verrucosa is the first noticed.
Any thoughts on why this would happen?? I have really slow growth in my SPS and many corals haven't grown more than a cm or two over the past 2 years. I also have little to no corraline algae growth and I'm sure they are both related to low alk levels.
I have tested my ELOS kits against two different control solutions from different manufacturers and the kit always read the solution as it's labeled. I've tested with Salifert and get a reading about 1-1.5 dkh higher.
I do notice I seem to get a fair amount of sand clumping in the areas of highest flow. I'm assuming that would be caco3 precipitation because some of the chunks turn completely rock hard. I even had some caco3 precipitation onto my chaeto a few weeks ago????? This seems odd to me that it would occur at alk levels of 6.5-7 dkh. I've never gotten the alk past 7.5 dkh because the corals begin to look so stressed I'm afraid I might kill them if I continue on.
I dose the ca reactor effluent and kalk into my sump (at opposite ends) and it is always mixed into the water nicely before it returns to the display. I dose kalk constantly throughout the day as well as using my ca reactor to keep up with what my kalk can't (don't have a lot of evaporation).
What's completely baffling and very frustrating is that many friends have gotten frags from me and they maintain their alk levels at 9 or 10 dkh and the corals they get from me thrive. In their tanks the corals grow at what I would consider normal or fast and they have spectacular polyp extension.
I can even see coral irritation and lack of polyp extension when I do a small water change with a salt mix like IO or RC which has a high alk level.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!!!
Does anyone else have trouble like this??
I'm almost to the point of having my water sent off to ENC labs to have a full analysis to see if some heavy metals are out of wack and precipitating out onto the corals surface when alk levels rise. That's the only "shot in the dark" guess that I can come up with at this point.
I did dose two part exclusively for about 6 months and the problem still persisted when I tried to raise alk. I tried both sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate thinking that the pH may be the key but both alk supplements of the two part irritated the corals just the same when I tried to raise alk. I've tried every combination of ca/alk supplementation as well as each one individually and always the same response.
Stabiliy. Definately the key factor in SPS general health, growth, and nice polyp ext. I go great lengths to maintain stability. Unless I'm intentionally trying to raise alk (or backing it down after the corals get irritated from the increase) my water params are rock solid. I keep my alk at 6.5 dkh and for the last year I've tested almost daily. I'm able to keep it from shifting at all unless I intenionally experiment with yet another attempt at raising it. I don't try to raise alk levels often but once every couple months I give it a shot with a different method hoping to find the key to letting me maintain my alk level a little higher without stressing the SPS.
My ca is always solid at 400 and mag at 1300. I don't think they've shifted at all in the last year. I don't dose anything to keep mag where it's at, I simply rely on water changes and that has kept it stable.
I had my system set up to do 10 gallon water changes automatically every day but I had a pump go out and for the last month I've been doing about 25 gallons two times a week. I currently use a combination of 50% tropic marin pro reef and 50% instant ocean. I have a system which has a total volume of about 600-700 gallons so a 50% or 100% water change is pretty much out of the question. I have the ability to do a 100 gallon water change at one time and I've done that a few times. A couple times with just tropic marin pro reef, once with instant ocean, and once with a 50% mix of each. The SPS seemed slightly stressed with the water changes using tropic marin. The SPS were very stressed with the 100 gallon change using IO - very likely due to the high alk value of IO salt mix. The 50/50 (tropic marin/IO) water change showed more irritation than the plain tropic marin water change but less than the IO water change (correlating irritation directly to alk values of the salt mixes).
I do have a very low nutrient system. I have little to no nuisance algea growth other than a little derbesia that none of my animals will eat. I run an algea turf scrubber and grow chaeto. I get very little growth on the algea turf scrubber and the chaeto grows at a snails pace. For a while the chaeto was actually dying off. My nitrate was always undetectable and po4 (per hanna photometer) was consistently reading 0.02 or less. With the chaeto dying off I started feeding my fish lots of food trying to get more nutrients into the system. The fish get fed a huge amount now every day and I finally have nitrate detectable at approx 2 and po4 last read at 0.03. The chaeto has stopped dying and is now growing but very slow (still only a slight amount of slime algae on the glass that the builds up so slow I only need to clean the glass every 2 weeks (not because I'm lazy, just because it takes 2 weeks to get enough built up on the glass so I can notice it). I've recently started dosing the ELOS amino acid supplement and their product called pro skimmer which I believe is a DOC/carbohydrate concoction for corals. I thought for a while that my system may be reacting like some do when people are using bacterial proliferation. In those cases (although unclear etiology) the systems must have alk maintained at levels below 8dkh to prevent burnt tips on SPS. Well, I can't even hit 7 without serious irritation! I'm not dosing any carbon sources and the coral tissue loss is at more than just the tips. It was just a thought since my nutrient levels are quite low.
I have a 4 stage RO/DI unit and TDS is always 0 with my inline meters. I have a comTDS-100 which I routinely check my water with (in addition to the inline monitors that I check every time I turn on the RO/DI unit). Once the inline monitors read anything but 0 or my com TDS reads anything greater than 0.7 I change the DI resin and evaluate if the sediment or carbon blocks need to be changed. I take good care of my RO/DI unit.
It was very kind of ostrow to do some reasearch and link to my local water source analysis to see if my source water had high levels of any trace element that could be getting post my RO/DI.
I contacted the person in that report and he is going to get me a full water analysis report next week. He said they are also doing water testing again this year and will send me the full report.
I actually did try just IO salt mix for two months and during that time I didn't try to raise alk levels. I did notice that with each water change, even the small daily 10 gallon water change, the corals seemed irritated and would retract polyps for several hours. The reaction seemed very similar to how they acted when I would try to raise alk so I didn't even bother trying to raise alk while using the IO. It would sure be nice if I could just use IO since it would be so much cheaper. Thank you for the thought!!
Strange problem - yes. Frustrating - absolutely X 10 !!!!
To maintain my alk at 6.5 I dose about 4 gallons per day of fully saturated kalk. My calcium reactor runs at a very slow rate to just pick up what the kalk can't maintain. It's about a drop a second from the effluent line. It's not a lot of ca/alk supplementation but for a 400 gallon tank I don't have it stocked very well and there is virtually no corraline growth. Not to mention there isn't much SPS growth to take up much alk. Wish I had the opposite problem. LOL!! I've got lot's of ways to supplement ca and alk but the tank just doesn't want it.
I think I heard that you're not supposed to run an RO/DI unit after the softener due to the sodium in the water which can be hard on the membrane (I believe that's the concern). I never thought much about it since the TDS is so low to begin with I wasn't worried about overworking my ro unit. Good thought though. I'll pose that question to the chemistry guys.
Lighting is good but not supreme. I have three 400 watt halides on a track going back and forth about 12 inches. It's pretty darn good coverage but I'm going to invest in some LED's and get more fixtures over the tank so I don't have to run a track. Recent PAR readings were approx 350 2-3 inches below the surface (directly under a light), roughly 200 mid tank and about 90-110 on the bottom center with the PAR dropping to about 70's at the far corners.
Flow is probably better than most tanks. I have three hammerhead gold pumps (5,600 gph) on closed loops going through OM 4-ways. I also have a hammerhead gold on the return from the sump in the basement which is valved down a bit so probably 2,000-2,500 gph when you take into account about 15 ft of head pressure. I also plan to add some koralias on a wavemaker for even more random flow. Recently I tried one for a while and noticed my acans puffed up a bit more and seemed happier. With the 3 closed loops and return pump I have about 44X turnover of the display.
I agree with low nutrients causing slow growth. The first 4-5 years of having a reef tank I battled nuisance algea and excess nutrients due to lack of knowledge on proper filtration methods. For the next 18 months I then ran the zeo system and learned what a tank can look like when nutrients are stripped to low (one extreme to the other - LOL!!). Due to the cost and some concerns I had with the zeo process I decided to drop the use of zeo products and used vodka dosing. After some trouble with various bacterial proliferation methods (mainly stripping nutrients to fast and too low) I decided to use conventional methods of filtration and simply monitor the nutrient input into the tank a bit closer. About a year ago I set up this 420 gallon display and have never had trouble with excess nutrients. Since I set this tank up I've had limited nuisance algea growth and limited macro growth (If I don't feed massive amounts of food my macros begin to die). I attribute that to good flow, good skimmer, and having a relatively low fish bioload since this tank has been set up.
With that in mind I had seriously considered that the growth issues with stony corals was related to nutrients being too low. For the last 6 months I've seriously increased the amount of fish in my tank as well as feeding massive amounts of food every day. I have an auto feeder which feeds about 1/2 tsp of food (mixed pellet, flake, cylopeeze, and mixed zooplankton) with each feeding. That feeding is delivered slowly over an hours time 4 times a day. In addition I feed a 2inX2in chunk of rods food (herbivore blend) once daily. With the rods food I also throw in a couple cubes of mysis or brine shrimp. I also feed about a shot glass full of live blackworms every day. The blackworms feeding is usually split up among feeding the fish and target feeding the LPS when the lights go out. I also feed a full sheet of nori every day or every other day. I also feed about 10 algea wafers so my snails and hermits don't starve from the lack of algea growth. 3-4 times a week I feed a 1/4tsp of decapsulated brine shrimp eggs when the lights go out. I've recently started dosing various types of phyto and I use about 3X the recommended dosage. I don't know anyone that feeds that much and has as little nuisance algea growth as I do. My fish are extremely fat and there are no signs of excess nutrients whatsoever. I'm afraid to feed any more because I'm feeding such a large amount already. Even with all that feeding the highest I can get my NO3 to is 2 and po4 up to 0.03???????
A quick thought on the low nutrients. Here's my build thread. This post shows the internal plumbing for the closed loops and how I covered all the PVC with dried rock rubble. I used GE silicone #1 which has been decided as safe by nearly all who have used it for reefs. I used a lot of silicone to glue all that rock to the PVC - roughly 20 tubes. The curing agent in the silicone is acetic acid (vinegar). The silicone was definately all dried before I put water in the tank but I wonder if there is some acetic acid leaching from the silicone and inducing bacterial proliferation as the acetic acid is acting as a carbon source. I would think that since the tank has been running for a full year now that anything that would leach from the silicone would be done, but I guess I can't say that for sure. Just a potential thought on why I have such low nutrients.
If anyone here in the chemistry forum has any other ideas I'd love to hear them. This is very frustrating to say it lightly.
Any thoughts on the RO/DI unit being plumbed in after the water softener??
Thank you!!
Jeremy
