sps guru advise?

[marthin]

Hi all,
firstly, thanks for all the great advise over the years and seeing stunning tanks as motivation.
Movied house in February, decided to upgrade to a 4x2x2. Up to that point things were ok. kept corals for a mate who's tank was crashing and actually got a complaint corals are now too big. Was using 6 x 39 Watt ATI.
Want to go bigger, but life is not that settled to upgrade biggest, so bigger would do.
Since then it was more woes apart from the fact I got the opportunity to buy amazing corals, got given beauties and found some real gems locally.
From the minute go my corals just did not react at all like before. Some polyps are just weird, almost no tenticacles, the whole polyps pushed out.
A month ago I chucked the deltec refractometer, got glass hydrometer and OLD refractometer out and found that salinity was 1.034 (coffee and whiskey sold out the next day locally)
Algae was mental so I removed all rock and placed corals on eggcrate on pvc piping.
some live rock in the sump still.
changed my sump light and got cheato to keep filtration.
Started cleaning sand with powerhead into the sand.
got huge cyno (this I put down to removing rock, likely cycling again)
when moving tank i got a hydroponic light, Lightwave.. 8 x 54 watt. some people on this side of the pond had big success with these cheap lights.
2 weeks ago my lightwave unit started dying, so I thought.. i have tons of sps, so back to 8 x 54 Watt ATI.
5 narva blues, 2 6500 K and 1 x 10000k.
Algae was on the up, so in the week after about 10 days, I switched to 3 x 10000k and 5 narvas..
yesterday I noticed the calcium was well up and polyps less.
nitrates < 2
phosphate (merck) 0,008
Alk - 8 (want to aim for 10)
Mg - 1360
Ca - 500 + (I know, it needs attention) aiming to 450ish

Line of thinking:
switch back to 3 x 6500K to enhance growth and keep things as stabil as possible from now on.
I figure it could take months for my corals to recover fully
any thoughts on this?

 

[marthin]

Sulking tank

 

[Stolireef]

The story isn't clear but it sounds liek you are trying to do too much, too fast. If algae/cyano is a problem, do water changes and good nutrient export (skimmer). Do them for a few months and see if things improve. IMO, 6500K lighting in reef is a no no that further encourages algae. I'd keep lighting at 14K at lowest (but that just my preference). Water numbers seem OK other than salinity. Make sure you adjust that back down very slowly.

Finally, get the rock back into the tank. That's a major part of your filtration and right now, it's gone.

Or, you could do down to the corner bar, have a beer or seven, and let the tank slowly settle down by itslef.

 

[marthin]

Hi Stoli,
thanks for the reply. Totally in agreement that it's too much at once.. it was either that or the classifieds! It all comes down to the light in the end.
Removing the live rock, etc was all done before the light unit went on the blink.
Now, back with the ATI there is a marked difference in only 2 weeks... there were several more drastic things I thought of doing, but now it's stability, stability and slowly getting the liverock in there.
Since last year I could not even get a montipora of any description to grow, never mind the acro's or xenia.
Once I have good growth and ALL the corals are back to health, I will rescape, but then I know it's all good and the corals can handle it.
What's worse is get silly offers this past weekend for stunning corals.. how can a man say no...