Sheez Steve. Sorry for your losses. Figured it had to be something besides the skimmer & oxygen, as many dont run skimmers and IMO, the overflow/down stack provides more than enough o2.

Sometimes I look at my controller, {RK2} and wonder.

I know what you mean Doug, you spend all this money on these devices that are suppose to make things easier and safer but all they really do is add more complication which can result in more human error. I tried to make this system as simple as possible to avoid these kinds of things but I guess I should have maybe left the controller out as well. Oh well. Your RK2 is probably a little better since it's not translated from German, things are probably a little more clear.

It still makes no sense to me, "when active then feeding pause", wouldn't one assume this to mean if device active then include in feeding pause? The other way doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Anyways, I haven't decided what to do as far as selling or staying in yet. I feel bad about the losses and there's a lot going on in my life right now so much more involved than this last disaster, but knowing the exact cause really helps. If it was up to me I'd probably just sell it and start up fresh a few years down the road with things stabilize. However like most of us I have a better half who always seems to have 51% ownership and gets the final say and she's against selling so.....

Since I know the cause I decided to continue with the experiment, the skimmer is set back to the 0.5 duty cycle. I'll have to figure out a way to program it the way I want it but for now it's just a timer combined with a filter so it shuts off during a feeding pause but doesn't have the extra delay I want. I will continue with things as planned and report back with results. I'll be testing Nitrate and Phosphate weekly in an attempt to track results but likely the real results will be all visual.

well, this sucks, how are the corals doing now? it always sucks when we loose stuff, but for the most part I would rather lose fish than corals, even though I would still be choked losing fish I had a long time.

as for deciding weather you stay in or not, this is a relitivly minor setback, if the corals and rock is fine, you can do a big water change to speed up the stability. It sounds like you have figured out what caused it and it is a preventable issue so there shouldn't be a repete. when my heater stuck on and wiped out everything, including my rock (was nutrent pluged after the crash) I almost stopped also, as it would have cost about 5 to 7K to replace the corals, rock and fish to exactly how they were, so I know how you feel.

Steve

Thanks Steve, the corals are doing fine, well some of the LPS are still unhealthy but basically this little disaster had no effect on the corals or inverts.

To me it's not about the money, but some things can't be easily replaced. The seahorse and lion together were, without a doubt, the center piece of this tank. The lion could be replaced with some effort on training a new one but the seahorse will be especially hard to replace since I haven't even had another importunity to buy a mate since I purchased the original. As far as I remember it was a special captive bred type from Australia and from my experience the only type worth keeping and the only type I will keep. In particular everything in the tank was chosen around the seahorse and to loose that particular piece of livestock results in the tank making little sense to me now. It also just sucks to loose stuff like this when you're making efforts to improve the tank.

Normally I wouldn't say this but... listen to your wife :)

sorry wasn't trying to make it about the money, for me that wasn't the issue either I was just trying to show the size of loss I had. for me it was about the corals, I had a tri color milli that was almost 24" dia and about 3 other very large corals which would have been impossible to find in that size. I can relate to losing the showpieces of the tank you designed yours around a couple fish, I did mine around corals and my fish were secondary. Anyways now you have the opertunity to change a few things or find something else you wanted that maybe wasn't compatable with what you had... always got to look at the bright side, is my way of thinking.

Steve

We learn daily, I have never been a big supporter of reef controllers but prefer to stick with PLC's and let a reliable source program it, I have a controller in the works that will give me a bunch of programs to choose from but am still paranoid that during selection there may be a glitch that I may be unaware of.

Stephen, take the issues that you find,use you resources to find a solution and let them know, the industry will be better for it.

Update
 

Both nitrate and phosphate are up slightly, previously both were at undetectable levels, now they are some what detectable.

Nitrate: somewhere between 0 and 1ppm so we'll say 0.5ppm
Phosphate: around 0.01ppm

I've also been feeding more and I've noticed a slight improvement in LPS health. Seems to be working.

It's strange the nitrate and phosphate would climb even though you aren't feeding fish anymore, and the bioload is subsequently lower. You must really be feeding those corals.

Well yeah and I got two new fish I'm currently training and two originals that survived so overall I'm using quit a bit more food. Plus it's not much of an increase, before it was without a doubt zero on the test kit, now it's just barely showing a possible detectable concentration.