Ya, to reiterate what everyone else is saying: Stop. Stop carbon dosing. Stop all/calc dosing.

Just do water changes.

I was helping someone recently who was having similar problems and instantly saw the problem. Pulled all dosing offline and within a week all the SPS were fine. A couple weeks out and they looked great. All tests showed the water beforehand looking fine but I'm 99% sure it was alk swings that were causing it.

Super low nutrients combined with alk swings from dosing is the perfect RTN recipe. If your tank is relatively new, you really shouldn't need to be dosing anything! There's no need to dose alk/calc if things aren't happy (because they ain't growing!) and nutrient levels should be controllable with only water changes and controlled feeding habits (for the first few months at least).

Why didn't you use any of your old rock? Is there algae all over it or pests? If not, I bet your tank would do a lot better with it in the system. As long as there are no pests and it is not cycling (no ammonia), then put it in the sump. If it won't fit in the sump, then put it in the tank even if you're just tucking it in somewhere temporarily. Between that, a few water changes, and stopping dosing I think you'll be back on track.

Ok I will stop carbon dosing immediately when I get Hom. I was told it was to help me raise my bacterial count faster. As I was dosing it from day 1 while tank was cycling. My old rock was removed because they were too big and filled with algae n not too pouris. I actually had way more death with algae than anything else in my old system as it smothered everything to death. Sps LPS and softies. I would like to thank everyone for ur help and input, I appreciate it very much. So for my game plan I'm gonna stop carbon dosing and Mybe slightly increase my rowaphos a bit over time. And of course STOP BUYING SPS lol. Well not gonna quit sps altogether but I will stop getting more for atleast 4-6months as my tank matures. I can't rly stop all dosing as my lvl does drop pretty fast as I do have a lot of corals now but I do notice my cal is always a steady 420 n doesn't change. Mybe I can reduce my cal dosing a bit over time to see if it changes or not

I see no reason to discontinue calcium and alkalinity dosing to maintain levels. Just make sure calcium and alkalinity aren't increasing while the corals are stressed. I would work on getting the magnesium up too. Just quit the carbon dosing.

Ok carbon dosing has been stopped. My Alk is somehow dropping so something must be growing. Cal stayed the same n mag is now increased to 1140. I don't see any sps getting worse. LPS is more puffy.

alk will reduce based on acids in the system. The tank produces various acids as part of being and alk is consumed while buffering pH. If Ca is staying constant, nothing is growing (worth worrying about)

Just going to jump onto Jason's thread here.

So if your calcium is going down but alk and mag are holding steady/very slow decline is that normal?

over what time span are you testing the calcium to see its drop? how much of a drop compared to alk?

Well my calcium isn't dropping holding steady at 450 but its being dosed a tiny bit, 12ml a day. I was dosing my alk the same but it was going up slowly every day. So I turned the alk off for now. I check my magnesium(1350) once a week after my water change. Add if needed. Have been checking calcium and alk every day since adding doser.

testing calcium drops daily is pretty much impossible to do on hobby test kits the margin of error is to high for such a low drop , test it weekly and find out what the weekly drop is , basically if your calcium is holding steady at only 12ml but alk is rising a bit then both need to be a lower dose , try 8mls and see what happens. eventually calcium will find a happy medium with alk.


tinkering for a bit with both is ok at first but if your using an equal measurement dosing product like 2 or 3 part then youll eventually need to set both the same.


as they say dose based on alk numkbers not calcium numbers. so test alk daily for a while and calcium once or twice a week and find what both needs are:)

fwiw coraline is a huge consumer of cal and alk that is often overlooked , alot of reefers think they are getting no growth yet their calcium and alk is being depleted because well......it is , coraline uses as much or in some cases more than hard corals do ;)

after a while you'll find that alk consumption doesnt happen in the evening ( or at least very little ) as much as during daylight as daylight hours ph is higher and corals and other animals are photosynthesizing:)

Thanks. I am letting the alk return to normal levels as it was going up with dosing then did a water change and that raised it even higher.

yeah best to hold off water changes while you figure out your dosing levels , if you take weeks i mean yes keep your maintanance going but don't do random changes while your trying to set your doser:)

OK then if I have my dosing locked in an my numbers are calcium 450 alk 8 and mag 1350 won't my water changes with alk somewhere around 10 constantly have me too high? or am I missing something?

right now while consumption is low yes it will , how much depends on your water volume and the size of the water change. later this may be a bonus or a bigger pita depending on the target goal;)

FWIW, I've recently gone through hell with alk and calcium in my tank and I had issues very similar to what you were describing several times over the year that I wasn't adding my alk and calcium supplements in a balanced way. I've only ever seen what you're seeing with acropora when there's an issue with alkalinity - either it's not stable enough, or you're not adding it in the right ratio compared to calcium.

And as Myka said, you're tank is essentially brand new. New tank syndrome is the 1 in a 1-2 punch for Acropora if everything else isn't perfect.

My recommendation -
a) Look up one of the balanced two part recipes, either Randy's two part which uses relatively cheap bulk chems, or one of the more expensive 'brand name' versions like Tropic Marin, b-ionic, etc.

b) Mix your solutions to recommended concentrations.

c) Forget what your calcium test is telling you - DO NOT deviate from dosing them in equal quantities. If your alk is rising but your calcium seems like it's stable, reduce the rate you're dosing both alk and calcium equally. There's heaps of articles online that I wish I hadn't forgot I read about this years ago, it would have saved me so much heartache. Coral, coraline, and pretty much everything that consumes calcium and bicarbonate/carbonate consumes those ions in a ratio of 1:1. This is the only ratio you should add them to your tank. Deviating from a 1:1 ratio in your dosing routine (even if it seems like your levels are "fine"), especially when your corals are already stressed out from a move and a new tank, is a recipe for disaster.
See: http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2002/11/chemistry
http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2002-04/rhf/feature/
http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-02/rhf/

Yes over time organic acids will cause a drift in Alkalinity relative to calcium when dosing at 1:1 ratios, but according to Randy Holmes Farley, this is something you need to worry about maybe once or twice a year and can easily correct with a one time manual bump-up. Your "normal" dosing rate of the big two should be as close to 1:1 as possible.

d) start testing for ammonia several times a day if you can. Your tank is effectively brand new. "new tank syndrome" is likely the product of unstable bacterial populations. I'm personally of the opinion that carbon dosing in the early stages of a tank's cycle can prolong 'new tank syndrome' as it promotes the growth of heterotrophic bacteria - not the chemoautotrophic bacteria that only consume ammonia and nitrite (which get all their carbon from the atmosphere). Heterotrophs can facultatively use ammonia, and they reproduce several orders of magnitude faster than autotrophs, so they may compete for both space and resources. Their populations are way less stable and if you just stopped carbon dosing they're going to crash, so your tank's ammonia processing capacity might not be as 'ship-shape' as you think at this stage in the game. Even small fluctuations could be deadly for acros.

Thx aslyum that was very informational. So I should not just stop carbon dosing instantly but to slowly decrease to 0? As for alk n ca dosing my ratio is 1:1.

So things r looking better. After large water changes and a tweak in dosing I have no more damage/death to anymore sps. My alk is currently been steady at 8 for over a week now and cal at 420 since forever. After switching mag buffer from the terrible seachem to schlobster mag sulphate and chloride, I was able to bump my mag to 1250 super easy. I will slowly bump it up to 1350-1400 over the course of the week. Phosphates is now lowered to 0.04. Carbon dosing has been stopped. My sunset milli that I tried saving by fragging all ended up dying except a 1/2" frag and my red planet that rtn in the center but I did not frag seems to have totally stopped rtning looks healthy. This is very strange as from my previous experience with rtn 90% of what I frag survives and 100% of what I don't frag dies. So totally opposite of what normally happens. I bought a few more sps frags and they all look super healthy with no color loss or rtn etc... My previous sps are coloring up. Things r actually turning for the good for the first time in awhile for me.

Nice work.

A load off your mind to be sure.

It's a very painful and expensive lesson to learn... bringing new SPS frags in a relatively new and unstable system. I hope everything works well for you now.

Good news.

I really appreciate the help from every1. Small mistakes in this hobby can be very expensive if not corrected right away. My tank is finally fully stocked now and I will be posting pics n updates on my journey. Stay tuned =)