Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[Janeallisonn]

Just felt you should know that I spent the better part of my day at work today reading this entire thread. Love the tank..and its ridiculous how big your cow fish is getting! Still praying to god that I never have to deal with ich issues like yours.

I just bought myself a Radion so I'm glad to see you've been having success with yours. Out of curiosity, could I bug you to post your daily schedule from Ecosmart Live?

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by lastlight

nice to hear a positive update adam! hopefully the new year is going to return the tank to its former glory. i still think your colours are really nice i wish i could match them.

Thanks, we'll see if this continues. I can't keep the chems stable for the life of me and am out of town for the next week. Tested everything on Thursday before I left and dKH was down to 5.2, from the mid 7's on Saturday. Calcium seems to have stabilized around 400, but alk is plummeting like a stone now. I'm worried I'm seeing the effects of a precipitation reaction, but it doesn't seem like my levels of either are high enough for that to be happening.

*sigh*

Originally Posted by kien

Looking good Adam! How's my frag doing that you've been holding for me ?

Seriously though, you may be onto something about that cap. My cap totally took over as well during my last round of issues and I totally think it crashed the Alk by agressivly consuming it!

All that's left of that colony you liked are those two frags on the sand. I'm hoping they make it as I've never seen it for sale anywhere else before.

Originally Posted by Janeallisonn

Just felt you should know that I spent the better part of my day at work today reading this entire thread. Love the tank..and its ridiculous how big your cow fish is getting! Still praying to god that I never have to deal with ich issues like yours.

I just bought myself a Radion so I'm glad to see you've been having success with yours. Out of curiosity, could I bug you to post your daily schedule from Ecosmart Live?

Thanks! and I'm still rocking the gen 1s, they've been pretty good to me. I would love to upgrade, but I don't love the idea of spending the equivalent of a decent car on this particular tank again.

If you pm me your e-mail address I can send you the schedule I use, but it's set for the diode colours in the gen 1 radion.

[asylumdown]

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.

[asylumdown]

Well, serves me right for trying to save money. The corals that got the angriest after yesterdays water change all look like they're done for.

I know there have been swings in parameters lately, but everything before the water change was healthy and growing. within seconds of the cloudy new water from that salt mix entering the display, this happened:



Overnight some acros have bleached out completely, some have browned out, and others have taken on a crusty appearance to their tissue that I've only seen preceding STN.

[Madreefer]

Oh crap that sucks!

I hope things get in check for you real soon. I love your tank
Good luck and don't give up

[wreck]

ohhh man....... that is terrible.
i am using the fluval salt atm this kinda worries me a bit.

[Aquattro]

Do you have enough of that left in the bin to test alk?

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by wreck

ohhh man....... that is terrible.
i am using the fluval salt atm this kinda worries me a bit.

have you had any problems with it? I've never seen anything like what happened, the last bucket of this brand didn't do that, but I bought it almost a year ago. I don't know how else to describe the smell - I'm used to freshly mixed salt water having a very distinct smell, it's actually my favourite part of a water change. This batch smelled completely different. It didn't smell bad, just completely different.

I'm also used to salt being a little cloudy right after it's mixed, but this was so cloudy you couldn't see through the water change chamber of my sump, even though the doors on the other side of the cabinet were open and the light in the office was on. I let it stand for half an hour with a Koralia mixing it and it never cleared. The only thing I can think is that the salt maybe wasn't mixed very well and there was an insane precipitation reaction? One of my angriest acros looks like it has white powder all over it

Originally Posted by Aquattro

Do you have enough of that left in the bin to test alk?

You mean of the new water? No, I do water changes (including mixing of the salt) out of a special chamber in my sump, so 100% of what I make ends up in the tank. It's a brand new bucket of salt though, so I'm going to make a couple gallons now and test it.

FWIW, I tested alk and calcium immediately following the water change. The 48-ish gallon water change only raised alk in the tank by 0.15 dKH and it didn't change the calcium level. In perspective, a half cup of Tropic Marin part B solution mixd to the recommended concentration raises my tank's dKH by 0.36.

If the salt was mixed badly and there was a lot of carbonate precipitate in it, would that have been enough to make the corals angry do you think?

[Masonjames]

The alk drop, and lack of being able to raise it may be a symptom of running a sewage treatment plant. Aka, dirty as sh** sandbed. If that sand bed is full of garbage and the system is trying to process it the bacteria may be using alk as a carbon source trying to keep up.

[asylumdown]

freshly mixed at 1.028 (man it's hard to mix a small volume of salt water!) it tests at 10.92 dKH, so at 1.025 it would be lower, but still on the high side, probably in the 10s.

So I think I get what happened, and it was a stupid rookie mistake. The alk in the display was 6.2 when I did the water change. It was 6.35 after the water change, but that was after I let the whole tank homogenize for 10 minutes. For a good 40 seconds to a minute after the water change, the water coming out of the return nozzles would have been anywhere from 90% to 70% "new" water, so while the net change to the tank was small, the acutely localized swings would have been huge.

I don't know why I've never had this problem before unless H2Ocean mixes with a much lower alkalinity?