Gorgeous corals bro. Saddens me to admit I've lost the majority of the frags I got from you. My sps troubles continue.

Really?!? Oh man what a bummer! I want to help somehow, we should get together and troubleshoot.

once again, nice LED corals Adam! I need to get in on some of that cerealis action there !

haha, I can't remember which one the cerealis is, but it's yours!

So it turns out you actually need to be kind of careful with MB7. After dealing with a cyano issue with an aggressive dosing of chemi-clean, I stepped up the use/change of GFO and started dosing the 'start up' dose of MB7 for high nutrient tanks, which in my tank worked out to about 70ml a day. I missed a couple of days to go up north over the holidays, but otherwise I was pretty religious about it, including turning off the skimmer.

I ran the inlet/outlet lines of the BP reactor in a bucket of salt water for the first 4 or 5 days after the chemiclean treatment while I started dosing the MB7 because I have no idea what chemiclean does to biopellets and I didn't want a bunch of excess organic carbon to flood my tank, potentially giving the cyano a leg up over the MB7. When I put the reactor back online with the tank, I put about half the daily dose of MB7 directly in to the pellet reactor to get things going again.

Now, I have to say I was extremely suspicious of MB7, and bacterial supplements in general. I've used them before and never saw an effect of any kind, and I've always been highly suspicious of aquarium supply company claims in general (they use as much pseudo-scientific non-sense speak as the alternative health industry), as well as being suspicious that a bacterial product could have anything living in it by the time you bought it at the store.

Well, I suppose the proof is in the pudding -

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psd1cd1fdd.jpg

That disgusting pile of what looks like mucous is 1/4 of the goo that I had to eject from the outlet hose of my recirculating biopellet reactor yesterday. In less than two weeks of dosing large volumes of MB7, that outlet hose, which has remained clear and free flowing for nearly 2 years, clogged up so badly with that crap that water completely stopped flowing through the reactor. It's recirculating, so there was still some movement of water inside the reactor, but with the outlet blocked it slowed down enough that massive orange sized wads of white bacterial mulm had formed on the surface of the pellets that were largely stuck together.

The foam pads in my GFO reactor have also completely clogged up with bacterial mulm, causing the entire column, along with the foam pads, to rise all the way to the top of the reactor. Something that also, in nearly 2 years of running the tank, has never happened.

I've gone down to the daily maintenance dose of MB7, which if I'me measuring the volume of a 'drop' correctly, is about 6ml, so hopefully this stops happening.

Wow that's a lot of bacterial slime! Good thing you caught that, if it was to build up more, imagine if the BP reactor got plugged. :sad: I have always been dosing vodka but never any bacterial supplement, I found that even vodka alone can produce a white slime film if used incorrectly. From Sunnyx's tank MB7 looks like it can perform miracles. I'd be interested in seeing the long term results and I might give her a try.

First, the low dosage for your size tank is no more than 4 ml per day or about 5 drops per day. Is that what you are doing? Then you can drop that in half again in a few weeks.

Also, I have never recirculated my bio pellet reactor, and not sure what that would do. The output has always gone to my skimmer. And I never turn off my skimmer when I dose MB7. Maybe that white goo includes carbon from the bio pellets that aren't being skimmed off.

Like I said before, I have never seen what you describe. In fact, only the opposite, ie the absence of mulm, and very clean reactors. Even my sand and tank in general were cleaner with the use of MB7.

The tank is around 375 gallons when you include the sump, but I was having a hard time figuring out how much is in a 'drop' lol, so I might be over-estimating. When you work it out the low dose amount is 0.1 'drops' per gallon per day, or 37 drops for the whole system volume. I tried counting out drops in to a 10 ml syringe and got 7ml, but there were a few at the beginning which were kind of messy so I went down to 6ml. Is that still too much?

And a recirculating pellet reactor is just one design for a reactor. It lets you tumble the pellets at whatever rate you want them moving independent of the amount of actual water flow through. I'm not sure that the design will ever catch on (I think there's only a couple of brands making them still) but when I set up my tank they were touted as the next big thing. Apparently they solved the problem of pellet reactors stripping tanks of all nutrients when you pushed enough water through them to get a good tumble. They were supposed to let you 'dial in' the nitrate levels proactively, increasing or decreasing the output as needed. You can dial back the actual amount of water that gets processed per minute without risking the pellets clumping. I've had the outlet valve opened to 100% for like a year though so I'm not sure it was worth the added expense. The valves still need to be balanced though, so if the outlet line clogs up, or you reduce the output on purpose, you need to increase the flow on the recirculating valve to compensate, which is why the reactor starts to shut down if it clogs and you don't see it happening. My outlet line still goes directly to the skimmer intake.

And I'm not sure why it's happening, I'm thinking maybe there were more nutrients in my tank than I thought? One would assume that if you dose bacteria in to a system with food for the bacteria, you'd get a bacterial proliferation, which on the one hand is good because it means that the nutrients are being consumed, but surprising at how strong the response is? It's only been a couple of days at the low dose, so we'll see if it calms down. I have to feed A LOT because of that cowfish, which can only increase the amounts of everything.

Well I'm a convert. It's at least doing something. The only thing I'm worried about is that it might have driven nutrients too low. Some of my corals have really paled out in the past week.

Well, this is definitely interesting. Must be some kind if imbalance, but not sure exactly what.

I actually only dose about 2 or 3 times per week (20ml total per week) for a 230g system (I don't incl my sump, as figure I subtract that much for the live rock). Been doing that for 2+ years now, and everything has been good.

Have not opened by bio pellet reactor (to add pellets or clean) now for over a year. Seems that my bio pellet consumption has all but stopped, but my nitrates remain at zero.

And remember, when I started all this (3.5 years ago), my tank (which I inherited when we bought the house) was a total mess with nitrates up to 100 ppm, cyano, algae, detritus, you name it...

Did some re-working of my sump last weekend. Two things about my sump have bothered me from almost day 1.

1 - I have too many things that require pumps and power in my sump. The only place to put them is the water change chamber mostly, which makes it cluttered and takes up volume.

2 - My sump is a micro-bubble factory. It's U shaped, as in to say water entered and exits the sump on the same side, but since going back to regular durso style overflows I have come to realize that my design allows for a fair amount of water to basically bypass the entire sump, which doesn't give the microbubbles from the overflow time to rise and pop.

Unfortunately I don't have many pictures of how it used to be, but the changes were thus:

I previously had one pump running my GFO reactor, and a separate pump whose sole purpose was to drain water from my sump for water changes. The GFO reactor pump was VASTLY over-powered for the amount of flow I needed, and the other pump, which wasn't as powerful was taking up a lot of space for only ever getting turned on for 6 minutes every 10 days.

I got rid of the over-powered GFO pump and through some fancy plumbing, set up my water change pump to have more than one function
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps50030a7b.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psb3c69c8e.jpg

I t'd the line coming off the water change pump that previously went straight to a drain to the sewer, so that when the valve you see there is closed, water flows in to the reactor. When I'm doing water changes, I close the valve on the top of the reactor, and open the valve to the sewer and that pump drains my sump. Since a failure here would obviously be catastrophic, there's a second gate valve further along the pipe closer to the sewer drain, so two gate valves would need to fail for that pump to start draining my tank. I also put the first gate valve well below the water line, because the line is under some pressure from the reactor flow being throttled. This way if there is a failure in my hoses the pump won't go spraying water all over the inside of my cabinet.

I also took a piece of acrylic and siliconed it to one of the exits from my skimmer chamber. Previously, water leaving the skimmer chamber was split by a bulkhead, with half flowing in to a skinny and long 'frag chamber' (though I've only ever used it as a cryptic refugium filled with live rock and sponges), and half flowing in to the large water change chamber. The water that went directly in to the water change chamber could then make a quick 90 degree turn and flow in to the return chamber, taking all sorts of micro bubbles with it. I don't remember my logic for thinking that the 'frag' chamber couldn't handle 100% of the flow of the sump, but with this acrylic piece in place, water now is forced to make the full journey from one of the the sump to the other.
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps219a6daf.jpg

Before I had to run filter socks, or my tank was a micro bubble mess. Now without filter socks, there's about as many micro-bubbles as there were with a fresh sock on the tank before. With filter socks, there's now zero micro bubbles.

And even though very little has changed because I chopped so much stuff back, some gratuitous full tank shots because I can
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps66acec5c.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps3af5598f.jpg

oh, and you can see from the pic of the GFO reactor that my GFO is all up near the top of the reactor. Since I started dosing MB7 I've been having problems with things clogging - the output line of my biopellet reactor, the sponges in my GFO reactor, etc... I've been having to empty the GFO reactor and rinse out the sponges really well every few days or they get so clogged the whole mass of material inside it rises to the top like a hydraulic piston. I don't think fresh water actually kills that biofilm though, so last time I did it I bleached the heck out of the sponges and so far it hasn't happened again.

I've cut way back on the amount of MB7 I'm dosing hoping this will stop happening.

Looks good, always feel's good to clean stuff up a bit .
Also how is the cowfish doing? Is he healing up ?

yah his tail is about 75% back to normal. It will never be completely as it was before though I don't think. Even if it manages to regrow back out to it's original shape and extent (It looks like two large bites were taken out of the top and bottom of it), there's definitely scarring in the new tissue. The fin rays aren't perfectly straight anymore.

He's getting so freaking big. He no longer fits between the rock and glass in one corner of my tank. I might have to re-scape to accommodate him.

It's been a long time since I posted. Mostly because 2014 was so bloody heart wrenching. Lots of my tribulations were played out in the main room so you all know, but the tank has gone from this in January:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps6ca6e181.jpg

to this today:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...pse4c0ff6c.jpg

mystery coral die off in February that required herculean efforts to correct, then a house renovation in August that poisoned the the tank with self levelling cement and glazed porcelain tile dust.

A few things came through ok - namely most things in the montipora genus, but nearly every single acro either lost massive amounts of tissue, or died completely. I've thrown out about 30 pounds in dead coral over the last two months, but things finally seem like they're turning around. New growth tips are forming and places where I've cut away dead skeleton are starting to heal, but nothing is the right colour anymore, and I've lost lots of specimens I may or may not be able to find again.

Worst hit area of the tank was the North side:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psd4caabd3.jpg

to this:
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psf39cf93c.jpg

If it wasn't for a couple very weedy, common and boring montiporas that have exploded through all of this, the tank would be awfully bare.

Very well done. What a stunning tank. The die-off must have just crushed the spirit I'm sure.

Its still a beautiful tank, Im sure it wont take long to get back to where it was

Things are slowly recovering, enough that I've felt comfortable buying some new frags to fill in holes left by my old corals.

My biggest issue recently has been keeping my macro elements up, however. I've been extremely time poor recently, so I've only been testing once a week, before a water change. If the levels have been low, I up the dosing rate, do the water change, then test again the next week. I know i should be testing before and after the water change, as well as testing the newly mixed water, but I'm getting tired of every single Saturday being taken up by this tank, and have other things I don't have time in the week to do in my house as well. Grrr.

This week I was floored. By yesterday morning my levels had cratered:

dKH: 5.9
Calcium: 303

This is after doing two water changes last weekend (Saturday and Sunday), and upping the dosing rate. My magnesium test is well and truly expired so I don't trust it, but it claims I'm in the 1250-1300 range.

I adjusted the alk up in to the low 7's, and calcium up to 360, then did a water change. I also upped the dosing volume by 15 mL/dose, then did a water change. I'm up to a grand total of 600 mL of Tropic Marin Part A and B balling salts PER DAY, mixed to the concentration specified on the box. I'm going to have to switch back to less expensive bulk chems.

This morning, (24 hours later), alk is still good, dKH of 7.11, but calcium was back down to 303! These levels are too low and too balanced for me to be having a precipitation issue, the only thing I can think is that this batch of H2Ocean has absurdly low calcium. I'll have to mix up a batch to test it.

These wild swings can't be helping anything, and I've got some STN at the base of an A. abrotanoides that I think might be a symptom.

Anyway, here's some crappy pictures. I dropped my new iPhone and cracked the camera lens, but won't replace it until the case I want it released in Canada. I'm notoriously hard on my phones. These pictures are blurry, and the colour balance is WAY off.

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psf6fe050d.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psc9d3da98.jpg

Thankfully my Pink Lemonade frag never had any damage through all this and is now a mini colony
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps923b0351.jpg

The lime green stag on the left used to be a colony that almost left the water, that's all that's left, but it's growing. The purple battered looking thing is all that's left of a plating acro from walt smith, but it's started sending tissue out over some of the dead areas again. The rest are frags I bought to fill in the worst hit part of the tank.
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps311e76b8.jpg

These two frags are all that's left of a dinner plate sized colony. They were the underside of the old colony, so they were brown and have never been exposed to light. It was touch and go for weeks, but they turned purple in the last couple of weeks, and there's the tiniest hint of growth. I'll move them up in to the rocks soon
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps0c8a6831.jpg

This poor guy.. I don't know if he'll ever be the same. Before this disaster the stalks were glowing white, with neon green polyps, and electric blue tips. It's growth pattern is all messed up as new growth tips start at odd angles from where things died. That monti is out of control
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps40092fc8.jpg

Nearly lost this guy but it's got all sorts of new growth
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psdcc2cba4.jpg

Randomly, this guy never even slowed down, grew right through that disaster as though it ain't no thing.
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps4956e619.jpg

Only thing I can think that explains my trouble with the chems is those montis everywhere. They weren't damaged by what happened at all, and have EXPLODED. I stupidly put pieces of that big red monti cap that I broke off doing normal cleanings in a couple of places and it's turned in to a major weed. I just throw those pieces out now. I can't imagine how much calcium and alkalinity it must be sucking out of the water to grow that fast alone.

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.

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

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!

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, 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*

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.

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.

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.

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:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps5c2d3972.jpg

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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?

I suppose that's possible, but I do vacuum my sand at least once a month, sometimes more. I started doing it in the spring because I kept getting ugly patches of cyano in the same places on the sand. My mind was blown by the amount of crud that came out of it the first couple of times, but it seems to be pretty clean now. I still have problems with cyano, just never on the sand now.

Ya I really don't know for sure. But all issues like that can be a good indicator of a tank heading towards "old tank syndrome". But if you have been on top of keeping the tank free of debris then it may not be the issue. Or you may be just slowly working your way out of it. To me it seems likely this could be the issue but really its just a guess.

*sigh* a guy just can't catch a break. Friday night I used the spigot on my skimmer to drain the collection cup. Forgot to close the tube and left it open to the drain overnight. Woke up Saturday morning to an angry looking tank and RTN in progress all over the place.

Bristle worms must have spawned or something in the middle of the night and drove the skimmer nuts. Salinity in the tank was 1.012. Worst. Timing. Ever.

A conductivity sensor that shuts the skimmer off would have prevented this. I suppose it's time I make the investment.

Bummer, man, sorry to hear. I got an Avast skimmate locker with their pressure sensor. It plugs into my controller and kills the power to the skimmer when the container is full. Best investment ever!

Great tank, BTW!

+1 on the Avast skimmate locker. I have the one that is basically a lid for a 5g bucket. Works well.

You could craft your own DIY if you're crafty but they're pretty reasonably priced all things considered..

That might be an even safer alternative to the probe.

How long does it typically take to fill 5 gallons of skimmate?

And also I bought some frags to make myself feel better lol

About a week in my case..

Most recent pics:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psxyaotqvc.jpg

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...psm6ok2rh3.jpg

Still having some annoying issues with my corals. I've got this weird tissue abnormality in a few of my acros that no one on the internet seems to be able to explain, but otherwise things are doing pretty well. I keep trying to kill my whole tank by making stupid mistake - too much H2O2, not noticing that the tubing connecting my doser to the alk reservoir had cracked and it stopped dosing for an entire week (discovering your dKH is 4.1 is never a good way to start a Saturday morning), and accidentally cratering the salinity be letting an overflowing protein skimmer drain the tank for a night are just a sample of the dumb things I've done so far in 2015, so maybe the tissue problem isn't so mysterious.

I've beenh crossing my fingers that a few of my previously majestic colonies that have survived the last year of tank hell with me but in really rough shape would leap back in to health, but I've started getting ruthless about tossing things that are limping along and replacing them. Friday night I took two big rocks that were covered in caulerpa (pro tip - don't let that stuff go! it literally dissolves coral tissue!) and bleached then acid dipped them. I'm also really digging the look of fewer, but larger colonies, so rather than replacing all the stuff I'm tossing, I've started fragging things that I like and have done well no matter what I've thrown at this tank and spreading them around more.

I do have a spot to fill but I want something truly awesome and hard to come by. Something that has a dumb name like Strawberry Shortcake or something. Anyone got any ideas? I'm hoping for an acro that spreads out.

Also, all my fish have grown up and they're starting to look ridiculous. This tank is supposed to be huge, but between 8 fully grown anthias, a mature powder blue, a full grown dilutes rabbit, and near adult cowfish, the tank looks small.

Has anyone ever fished a powder blue tang out of a tank like this? Him and the rabbit have really started going at it, but the rabbit is more important to me as a herbivore.

Also if someone is like "man, I really want a big a$$ cowfish" and lives in Calgary - you just let me know.