thx for you help... about my light i think should be fine; too many people out there are using the same fixture without any problems. i trying to buy a doser pump so i don't have to do manually. i have been checking my water every other day and no swing, the only swing i had was the PH and i thought that i had a swing with my alk too but i was wrong. i have test my water with three different test kit and they are all very similar
Yeah, you're right, probably not an issue of too little light...might even be too much light, now that I think of it, depending on what kind of lighting your corals were under at the LFS. These SPS are fickle.
I kept some in my 29, and they were maintaining pretty well until around the time I noticed my alk starting to drop to around 7 dKH. I started to dose baking soda by pouring it (dissolved in a cup of RO/DI water) slowly into my sump once a day. I'm afraid I may have poured it in too quickly though. One day my flame angel started to breathe rapidly, and died soon after. My two coral banded shrimp followed the flame angel (too slowly...the damage was irreversible). I posted a question about the situation here on RC, and someone suggested I dosed alk too rapidly, and that this may have caused a sudden but brief pH spike that caused serious damage. I lost my birdsnest soon after, and my other SPS got very light.
I guess what I'm suggesting is that even though I didn't dose my alk to a high level, I probably dosed it the wrong way. This may have caused brief (hence undetectable) rapid parameter swings that did the serious damage to my tank.
This may or may not apply to your situation - then again, maybe it does. FWIW!
Oh, and about the refractometer...?
