RAAAAAAAAAAGE
I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle with these parameters. And Murphy and his stupid law.
I can't for the life of me keep alkalinity over 6. Unless my dosing unit is a lying liar who lies, I'm now dosing 315 mL of Tropic Marin Part B a day. Calcium seems to have stabilized between 395-400, but alk and mag are in the toilet. mag won't budge over 1170, and I'll manually raise alk in to the mid 7s, bump up the maintenance dose, only to find it in the mid-low 5s again 3 days later.
Any suggestions? I had no intention of spending yet another entire saturday fiddle farting around with this fickle foe, and yet another 5 hours of frustration seems to have vanished from my life.
Other news - I was away for 7 days, came home around 6 last night to everything being fine (except for alk brushing the high 4s), didn't touch a thing in the tank and immediately went back out to a party. Came home at 11:30 to the skimmer going Krakatoa-nuts for no reason that I could see, and a SG of 1.020. Rage. Thank goodness it didn't happen a day earlier.
Decided to switch salt mixes again because H2Ocean is killing me. I get 4 water changes out of an 80 dollar bucket. Decided to try Fluval Sea again, as I've had part of a bucket kicking around for the better part of a year and used the last of it to bump the salinity up out of the danger zone last night. New bucket today mixed to a solution that just smelled... wrong. The smell had none of the high, almost sweet notes I'm used to with freshly mixed H2Ocean. I don't know how to explain it. It also mixed VERY cloudy and wouldn't clear. Within 20 seconds of adding it to the tank, my elegance coral's tentacles shrivelled up like they'd been burnt, and every polyp on every coral deflated and retracted. Not sure what's going on there. I spent the next 5 hours testing, bumping up levels, repeat.
Today was the first day in a long time I've seriously considered not having a tank of any kind.
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