To be clear, I have been using this salt since it was available. How long is that? A year or so? My tank has been great until recently when I started noticing a brown slime growing on my rocks. Since then my Chaeto started growing more slowly. My TDS readings were 2 but I changed the all of my filters and DI resin anyway.
Still the slime was growing as I performed weekly 5% water changes. Matters only got worse so I started changing 10% every week. Now my tank is getting really bad so I went to 5% everyday and feed the tank once per week. The slime was now over taking everything. Then I cleaned out the gunk from the sump and fuge while doing a 20% water change.
I don't have a heavy bio load for a 300g system. BTA, Maroon Clown, Orange Cap, one sm acro colony and a large digitata colony. My skimmer is more than adeqaute(ER CS12-4) for my system. My 250w DEs are less than three months old. Temp is a rock solid 80. Ph is a rock solid 8.3. My litermeter keeps the tank at a contant 1.027.
My tank has been set up for nearly two years. I did crash my tank last summer because of a faulty temp probe in my AQII. I lost 95% of my stuff but did water changes and got everything under control. I had a very minor algae outbreak at that time but things turned around with no issues until I swtiched locations of where I buy my buckets of Oceanic.
With all of my water changes things should have gotten better but they didn't. I checked my RODI water. No phosphate and the TDS reads zero.
I started thinking the only thing I have been adding is salt. I searched RC for info on oceanic and algae problems and found two huge threads. Many people were having the same problem as me. I've ruled out everything else. And remembered that the problems coincided with my getting buckets of Oceanic from a different LFS in AZ.
I am not new to reefing and have been keeping SPS many years with great results. How can my method of reefing work so well for 6 years and then fail miserably when I get new buckets of salt? The salt is the only variable in my system.
I've left buckets of new saltwater by my window for almost a week at times in the past because I couldn't change the water when I wanted to and I've never had anything grow in my buckets of new salt water.
How does that much stuff grow in just two days? There are supposed to be no nutrients in the water. Sure stuff may get into the water in the course of two days but not enough to grow that much stuff!! Yes, I scrubbed the bucket before I added anything to it. Was my experiment scientific? Not at all but it's enough for me to know it was the salt and not me. Especially considering that many of the local AZ reefers that bought oceanic from the same location are reporting the same problems.
What else could it be? Perhaps for some of you it's more plausible that a brown slime encrusted meteor crashed in the Arizona desert thus infecting all of our tanks.
