Thanks, ya I'm not sure what is going on. I'm going to do a full round of testing tomorrow. Unfortunately I had to top off my tank with "LFS" water from the corals I brought back from my trip. Something is up, I'm seeing burnt tips which would mean high alk from my experience but my alk is steady at 8.5-8.6 now in theory for a week straight. When I came back I found my hippo tang had died and gotten sucked into my drainage which I'm guessing caused the overflow. Not sure why it died either I raised it from a wafer thing mini-guy and was very healthy in appearance. I also found an increase in algea (guessing due to the decaying hippo tang in my filter sock), burnt tips on a few pieces and a milli frag had died which I found very odd as both the Milli and the tang were pushing a year for me.
Today I did a small water change and filled the tank the rest of the way so I could get the skimmer going, I also changed out my carbon/rowa (it was time), did a little plumbing I wanted to remove this "rio" pump I was using to push water to my "LPS/Frag" tank and just plumb it into my ehiem with valves instead. Years ago I had an "electrical" issue that really stumped me and caused me a lot of troubles (unexplained lost corals, fish, etc)... ...I've been meaning to pull it off for a while, just never trusted it. I also did a general "detritus clean-up/aefw hunt with an mj1200 before changing my water.) Hopefully tomorrow tests will reveal whatever is going on, and I can get back to focusing on seeing if my alk/calc/mag are solid. I also have a fair bit of fraggin to do I picked up really large baby blue/lavender w/white polyp acro that was dying in the center on the cheap.. I'm going to try to frag it and save it but the thing is like 1' across.
I'm half thinking of doing a large water change by the timing is bad I've been planning on switching to a different salt for some time now, and it's all I have left.. I don't think doing a massive water change with a new brand of salt is the best ideas not to mention I have mixed feelings about it, and may just switch back to IO or HW.