What's my problem??? Nitrate levels to low?

[mlb75]

I know there's probably a lot of people that would view low nitrate as a problem they'd love to have but I think it may be one of the reasons I've been having trouble with corals for some time.

Background, tank is 300G deep dimension with roughly another 80-100 in the sump. Skimmer is a Bubble King Super Marin 250, 8 bulb ATI Powermodule T-5 light fixture with good bulbs. I rarely did water changes but when I do it's 100G or so. I know I should do them more regularly but my levels have always been near what I thought was perfect and didn't really budge after a water change... I recently started running a GFO / Carbon reactor (from BRS) and did that simply because I figured it couldn't hurt and I want to get the tank back to it's prime of a stacked SPS reef. When I first set it up it was wall to wall sps that grew like crazy then I had something hit it and take out just about everything then I was gone for work a ton and the tank just kind of sat on cruise control as basically a FOWLR with the exception of the Fiji, a rock of heaven forbid zenia, and a lobo that just always seems fat and happy.

At the moment the Fiji is the only one that's really looking [profanity] but I'm really racking my brain as to what's causing it and why I can't seem to keep SPS anymore. Could I have dropped nitrate and or phosphate levels too much? To be honest I can't remember the last time I tested for phosphate but it doesn't matter how much I feed the tank my nitrates don't get past 1 and that's being generous.

My fish are all pigs, I swear I've got the most obese fox face and 5 other tangs (all 7-8+ inches) in addition to the normal anthias (7), Chromis (4), LTA with clown, Gold head goby, and a couple others that don't come to mind. So there's plenty of "organic matter" in the tank but my nitrate is still super low.

What should I be looking at? What am I doing wrong? Should I try dosing something to get Nitrate up to the 4-5 range? I feel like my issue is chemistry related because everything else equipment wise is right, what am I missing?

TIA

 

[outssider]

with that many fish and all the feeding, I doubt your nitrate is low enough to effect sps regardless what the tests show. I run zero p4 & no3 all the time and have a lot of fish and although not all coral will thrive, sps does great. If you start dumping nutrients in to raise no3 & po4 you are most likely going to end up with algae problems up the kazoo....

 

[bertoni]

So this tank had a good range of SPS corals, and now they're not doing well, or have they died off? Was someone else taking care of the tank while you were busy? Maybe something got added that has caused a problem. What are the phosphate and nitrate levels currently?

 

[Kurt03]

What happens to the sps that you put in the tank? Get a phosphate reading with something decent like the red sea low range kit or Hannah ulr checker. How fast does the glass need cleaned? Is it green or brown film on glass?

 

[mlb75]

I set the tank up in 2010 after I had a sump blow out under a 180 and flood the living room. That tank had some decent corals but I upped the ante when I went to the 300 and started with a bunch of new frags and within a year it was wall to wall coral. I'll try and find some pictures but to give you an idea I had different sps bridging between rock structures all with good color etc, the tank was jamming. Then I'd say sometime in 2012 I started losing color, then I started seeing things slowly die, and what was a small majano problem exploded and it frustrated me. I tried everything I could think of chemistry wise, all my parameters were right but stuff just started going downhill and I couldn't stop it. I lost almost all of the SPS with only the Fiji, one lobo, and some orange cap making it. The cap used to be huge with three different colors (red/orange, green, and purple) taking up literally 1/4 of the tank (think 2+ foot cube) with a green slimmer growing up out of the middle and now the red/orange is still alive and doing fine but only in spots that are a couple inches square apiece.

I'm pretty much the only one that takes care of the tank and right after it went downhill was when my work travel ramped up and to be honest I kind of said F it. The nieces and nephews liked the fish so I kept the tank and it's been running fine ever since as long as I didn't add coral.

Now that I'm home all the time I want to get it back to an SPS dominated reef with a few LPS thrown in for filler and to soften the look a bit. I've got the majano issue pretty much wiped out and I'll get that fixed before I introduce many more frags but the last couple SPS frags I've added just don't make it more than a few weeks and I don't know why. They start out OK then lose polyp extension then lose color and just die.

Just tested last night and alk was 8.0 (a little low I normally keep it around 9) cal was 420 and mag was 1250 nitrate was 0-maybe 1 and I didn't test Phos because I don't have a test kit right now. I've seen high phos kill corals before and I don't or didn't see any of those signs now or when I lost everything the levels have always been very low when I tested in the past but I do need to test again.

I'll test the rest of the stuff tonight and get some other values up.

As for the glass I use a mag scraper once or twice a week for a very light film it's a combination of light brown and or green but for the most part it wipes right up. If I go longer than a week it gets more green and takes a little more scrubbing but still comes right off. There's no algae on the sand but a fair amount on the rocks from being left unattended for a couple years but even that is coming around since I put two small pincushion urchins and a sea hare in the tank a month ago. Where they've cleaned up purple coralline is kicking in.

I'm just not sure where to look right now...

 

[Kurt03]

Are you running carbon and gfo in that reactor? Maybe pull the gfo and leave the carbon until you can test po4 since algae doesn't seem out of control.
What bulb combo are you running?
Age of bulbs?
Light schedule?
Are you putting these frags at the top mid or bottom when you first get them?
Doing any dips prior to adding to tank?
30" tall tank?
What salt mix?
Chloromine in rodi water?
Stray voltage?
Flow?
Dosing any additives?
Spray for bugs inside?
Perfume, hair spray, candles used around tank?
How, how often, how much, are you adding alk?


Sorry for all the questions just trying to get everyone thinking.

 

[bertoni]

Die-off problems like that can be hard to solve. I remember one system had problems with some poorly-made artificial live rock that took forever to diagnose, and that was mostly by luck. I might try running a PolyFilter, to see whether it changes color in some interesting way. After that, maybe some CupraSorb would be interesting, although the PolyFilter will detect fairly low amounts of copper.

 

[Kurt03]

I had a bad batch of salt do it.

 

[mlb75]

OK so I think I figured out what was causing the stress to the Fiji, I looked at the tank Friday night after the lights had gone out and could see the nem moving enough that it was coming up the back side of the rock it's normally in front of and was hitting the Fiji on the underside... The Fiji has been moved and I'll give it another day or two to bounce back but I'm willing to bet that's what was stressing it out.

I took my water to a local store that I trust and had them run a battery of tests to compare to my results and thankfully I was in line with what he got.

SG 1.026
ALK 9.5 (When I had things up and jamming before I found that a little higher alk seemed to encourage growth so unless there's a reason to back away from that 9.5 will still be my target. That's not to say I'm not open to other opinions.)
CAL 450 (A tad high but I'd just dosed)
Mag 1350
Nitrate, Nitrite, Phos all registered 0 or nearly 0

To answer the questions above;

Flow: Right now in addition to the return pump that I don't really count I've got 4 Tunze 6105's with enough flow that when I feed food is spread pretty evenly throughout the entire tank. I still have a fair amount of headroom to turn them up as corals grow in and need additional flow to account for colony sizes effecting the flow patterns.

Lights: The fixture is an ATI powermodule, it's an 8 bulb 60" fixture roughly 5-6 inches above the tank. I changed the bulbs about a month ago and the current combo is 3 ATI Blue+, 1 ATI Aqua Blue, 1 ATI Coral Plus, 1 Giesemann Tropic (65K), 1 KZ Fiji Purple, and 1 KZ Coral (10K). The color is relatively white but I like it that way. When I originally got the fixture I had a 3K in there and although I think it grew very well it was a little to white / yellow even for my liking. I may swap something out to get a little more blue but I'll see how I like this color for another month or so and see how the tank reacts. It seems to me that a little whiter / less blue light seems to grow better. The tank is 27" tall and to date the light seems to be plenty since in the beginning I had SPS growing in the bottom corners... The fixture is broken up into two “zones" the first has two bulbs the other has the remaining 6. The first zone is a B+ and the Fiji purple, that's on for roughly 11 hours a day, the others run for about 9 hours if I recall correctly.

The BRS reactor is the only one I've got running and I use their ROX 0.8 carbon and high capacity GFO. I run about 2 cups of each changing the GFO the 1'st of the month and the carbon gets changed on the 1'st and 15'th. I feed it from the return chamber of the sump and discharge back into the filter sock. It's been I'm place since the first of the year.

For salt, I get my saltwater from a trusted LFS already mixed but I'm 99% sure he uses IO, I'm sure there are better mixes out there but do they really make a difference?

For top off I have an RO/DI and the filters I get from Air Water Ice, I get the ones that are supposed to be good for chloromines as well. All filters are changed as soon as I get TDS above 0.

I don't think there's stray voltage since the only thing in the display are the Tunze's but I'll double check that.

For additives I've only used the Brightwell ALK, CAL, and Mag buffers but am considering trying to add some Kalk to my top off water. My concern with that is it's not a steady rate, some days I may evap 2 gallons others it may be 4 and I don't think I want that level of variation when adding supplements.

When I'm focused on corals in the tank (as I'm getting again now) I test at least every other day and have traditionally added one thing per day ie Mon, Wed, Fri add Alk and add Cal on Tues, Thurs, with Mag and anything else over the weekend. When I'm on that schedule Cal normally stays within 20 points (420-440) and Alk will range from 9.3-9.8 which if you factor in variance of the test results I think is good enough especially when the that would be a range of the weeks highest vs lowest readings. I can get that tighter but being honest, that's what it's historically been.

As for why the tank died a couple years ago, I don't think I can ever definitively answer that. I just want to make sure I've thought about everything I can to give myself the best chance for success and not overlook something before I dump a bunch of money on a batch of new frags.

 

[bertoni]

The anemone might have been trying to kill the Fiji. That's a fairly common action for anemones.

Those parameters all seem fine.

 

[mlb75]

Thanks, and yea it looks like I'm going to have to keep a real close eye on that nem. It was nice in the tank when it was predominately fish but I may have to get rid of it now that I want to go back to more corals.

 

[bertoni]

You're welcome. Good luck with the anemone!

 

[triplehippos]

When I had my 300G DD (Plus another 80 in sump and fuge) once I got the "basic" levels right (Ammonia, nitrates, nitrites) I went from a 20% water change every 2 weeks to a 10%. Initially, this was because I was being lazy, but my corals actually started doing better and everyone looked happier. I kept an eye on my levels but the only times I had trouble was when I put a new fish in that got stressed to death and I couldn't get out without moving a lot of rockwork. Did a 20% water change then. Then again, I don't dose anymore.