ready to give up, stn issues, help!!

jjoos99

jjoos99

New member
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I have been fighting stn from the base up on alot of my sps corals, Most of the corals were huge colonies and are pretty much dead but the top couple of inches of the coral. The following is the list of the test results I just took.
ph 8.02-8.2
mg 1200
cal 400
alk 8.2
phos 0
nitrate .1
temp 78.6
sal 1.024
I also have some red slime algae in my sump and have been getting some hair algae in the main tank. I have no coraline algae growth at all.
What might be killing off my corals? I just checked one of my tricolors with a jewelers glass and see no pests what so ever. The tank is a 180 gallon tank with 3 mp40 pumps and lighting is with led. My colors have faded or browned out. The test kits are fairly new also. Polyp extension is not too bad. I am at a total loss and am getting very frustrated almost mad.
Any help would be very appreciated before I loose them all.
thanks
Jeff
 
All your parameters seem in line, but I'm not buying the phosphate reading. If you've got hair algae in your display, there's only one thing that's feeding it and that's nutrients.

I don't know how you'er testing for phosphate but if it's any kind of color matching kit, it's pretty much useless. You didn't mention if you were running any type of phosphate media like GFO, so that would help as well. There are some other things that aren't mentioned that may help others give you some positive feedback:

1. What fish do you have?
2. How often do you feed?
3. What do you feed?
4. What is your maintenance routine (water changed, filter sock replacement, etc)
5. What kind of lighting are you running?
6. How old are the bulbs?
7. What is your photoperiod?
8. How are you supplementing calcium, alkalinity and calcium and are they kept stable, or do your numbers (especially alkalinity) jump around often?
9. What salt are you using?
10. How old is your tank?

This happened to me in my last tank. It's infuriating...I know. Not growing coralline is usually something associated with fish only tanks that are highly fed and have high phosphate. This will cause slime algae, a greening of the rocks, and coralline recession or the inability for it to grow at all. SPS tanks are usually littered with coralline algae because of their clean environments, good lighting and low nutrients. When your coralline isn't doing well it's a sign that something is out of whack, because when it's growing well in my tank, the SPS are usually very happy. With little to no polyp extension and recession from the base, I feel that this is your culprit. I would work on bumping the specific gravity to at least 1.025 slowly over the next few weeks, invest in a GFO reactor and maybe borrow or buy a Hannah Phosphate digital checker. Also, there are many threads about this, but your rock may be releasing phosphate back into the water column. In essence, it may be supersaturated. It could take you months to get things back, but I did beat this with regular water changes with clean, 0 TDS RODI water, new light bulbs and regular GFO use and changeout of media. It can get expensive changing it as often as you may need to at the beginning, but tearing down the tank frustrated is much more costly IMHO.

HTH
 
Big +1 to what Alex just said.

Your phosphate is probably higher than you think it is.

Your Alk might be lower than you think it is. Have you checked this with another test kit?

Your Salinity is on the low side. What are you checking this with? Are you sure it's not even lower?

Have you checked your temp with another thermometer?

Did all this just all of a sudden start happening or has this been slowly happening more and more over time?

You might have to frag off the living tips of you corals ahead of the STN and replant them somewere to stop it from spreading all the way up.
 
All of my test kits are salifert kits. My salinity is tested with a refractometer. I do bi-weekly water changes with ro/di water and use seachem salts. I dont believe my lighting is an issue since I am running led. I have started to run gfo in the past and each time over night the stn with get worst. I think the gfo either dropped my alk or ph levels overnight to cause the increased stn. I currently have both a ca reactor and a kalk reactor. I have shut down the kalk and increased the co2 and water output out of my ca reactor to try and stabilize things. I feel with the kalk being added along with the ca reactor I was not being consistant. The reason I added the kalk was for lower ph which I believe I have taken care of by running my skimmer intakes outside. Before doing that my ph would drop into the 7.8 range at night and barely make 8.0 during the day. Now my ph is 8.0 at night and 8.2 by the end of the day.
I have notice when I am getting coraline on the glass things are looking pretty good. I will start up my gfo again and try and raise my salinity, alk, mag, and ca levels some. I forget is it baking soda that boost alk?
I think I need to take reefsmac's advise and cut up the corals that are worst. I forget to mention that my tank is 4 years old. I did just remove my substrate a month or so ago feeling it might be harboring nitrates.
thanks for all the support.
Jeff
 
Hi all, sorry for jumping in, very interested in this as am having similar problems.

I'll post some info on hear.

Thanks in advance.
 
We have the same problem but I think we located the problem.
We have a new 150 gal up and running for about 20 months growing SPS from 1" to colony's of 8, 10, and 12". As the corals got bigger we started loosing color with some small hair alge issues about once a year that I think were due to feeding too much flake food and being lazy changing our filter sock, when we fed more other than flake food and changed the filter sock about every 4 days the hair alge problem went away. We also have a Hanna Phos checker and the readings never higher than 0.06.
We started getting a very, very slow STN issue and I would cut the SPS and remount and things would be fine for a while. This would happen with newly added or very delicate SPS but not hardier BN, or Montiporas. This happened to about 4 of 30 SPS colony's in the tank.
So I thought I would upgrade our skimmer from a R/O ex 200 to a super R/O 3000i and the skimmer was pulling about twice as much skimmate, I thought this was great! But three weeks went by and we got a big STN / RTN issue. Loosing our 8, 10" colony's to many frags. The only thing we changed was our skimmer. I think we starved our corals, and I think we were doing the same thing but at a slower pace with our old skimmer. So I dug out an old G3 skimmer and replaced the R/O 3000i and we skimmed 1/8" in 5 days and slowly are getting better colors than in the last 9 months.

So after our problem, could you be skimming too much? I'm 95% sure that this was our problem but still working through it. I have always read bigger is better when it comes to skimmers.

Hope this helps
wrimda
 
I havent ever calibrated the refracto with calibration fluid, I have always just used my ro/di water. I just tested my makeup water with my tds meter and got a reading of 67. Then again I have never calibrated it either. I did start up my gfo today and have it shut down at night just incase it would pull down my alk/ph.
Jeff
 
I just recalibrated my refractometer as it was a few points off. Now I'll recalibrate monthly. TDS of 67 is way too high, and hopefully is wrong. That could be the cause of your algae issues. I wouldn't rule out your lighting as the culprit. There are many people losing corals with LEDs, just as there are success stories. I would retest all parameters, maybe have a lfs check them out. Your mag is a little low. I don't know if Salifert kits can test Nitrate to 0.1 range, maybe you meant 1.0? I hope you get things stabilized.
 
You are right the nitrate does test at 1ppm. I hopefully am having a local club president over tomorrow to have him take a look and test with his kits and meters. I am hoping he will see something that I have failed to see.
Jeff
 
How deep was your sand bed before you removed it? Disturbing a deep sand bed can wreak havoc, even in an established tank.

I wouldn't be worried about your level of nitrates. 1ppm is an acceptable level.

Also +1 on your TDS being too high. When was the last time your changed your DI resin and prefilters? You will want to do that ASAP to get your TDS down to zero.
 
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What brand rodi? Also make sure when you pull your sample water to test TDs, you do so in a clean cup, I like the red disposable beer cups. Youll be surprised how much TDs you can pick up from a dish or you ato container.
 
I can almost guarantee that when you removed your substrate you released something toxic into the tank(the chemical name escapes me at the moment, but it is sulfuric and deadly) forget the stuff that builds up, but it is highly toxic.

I did the same thing a couple years back, killing huge sps colonies.

Water changes and gfo will help slow the process.
 
the nitrates and phosphates are higher than they test becuase the algae is using it up. TDS should read 0 coming out of ro/di if not replace all filters. Testing phosphates I would seriously consider getting a Hanna 736. I was using Salifert and was getting 0, I switched to new Red Sea was getting some where between .04-.06. Got fed up an bought a Hanna was reading .08 started switching GFO out again every 2 weeks and its dropping down to .03
 
My substrate was only about 1in or less and I removed it slowly, alittle bit at each water change. I have a fellow club member coming over on wed. with all the clubs meters and test kits. I am hoping we find something concrete. i should be able to check my tds meter against the clubs. I actually installed all new filters, di resin and membrane about 2 months or so. I have heavy iron in my well water so I will check the filters.
thanks
Jeff
 
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