water problem

urkunde

In Memoriam
I have a 380 set up as fo. I have had it running for 6 months and now I am having water problems. Last week I had a nitrite and ammonia spike I did a 50% change and it helped but now it is on the rise. I have a lion, salfin,sohal,yellow tang, two puffers, tusk, and zebra eel. I have tried to cut down eating I have added to to the cleanup crew and still no help. I have a large reef life skimmer, I am running carbon and have a uv starilizer. Please let me know what else I can do.
 
What do you have for filtration, other than the skimmer, carbon, and UV? How much are you feeding, and how often? How much LR is in the tank?

The answers to these questions will help with coming up with a long term solution. In the short term, Amquell or similar ammonia detoxifiers will help the fish till the actual problem can be addressed.
 
filter

filter

I have a 100 gallon sump with boi balls. No live rock went with acrylic coral three big pieces. I have 30 # of live rock in the sump.
 
Re: filter

Re: filter

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=11824501#post11824501 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by urkunde
I have a trickle system and the volume is about 6000 it is 20x20x15

What are the units of measurement for those numbers? If those dimensions are in inches, you have about 25 gallons of bioballs. Not quite enough for that size tank. Usual rule of thumb is 10% tank volume should the volume of bioballs. That said, I would look into adding cured live rock to the tank and slowly convert to a Fish Only With Live Rock (FOWLR). I find LR based tanks tend to be more stable than bioball, or other man made biofilter material based systems. Ideally you would want to shoot for between 1 and 2 pounds per gallon of rock. With your current set up as is, adding around 100 lbs of well cured rock would tip scales back and clean up that ammonia. Just make sure the rock is well cured as you don't want to have an ammonia spike from curing rock while there are fish in the tank.
 
live rock opens up your margin of error as far as fish go. It really works. If you had a recent spike of ammonia, in that sized tank, that is alot of ammonia, are you sure you don't have something dead in there?
 
Back
Top