Does carbon bleach your corals ? (Kent carbon recall)

[daniella3d]

A lot of stores have common water in their system. I am not sure if you realize this but he lost 10k of coral worth...and it does not take that much in coral to reach that amount. I personaly have about 3k to 4k in corals worth. I lost about half so far.

I can think of plenty of coral stores here that would have the same exact issue because all their aquariums are connected with the same water. It is very common.

I don't think they do it out of laziness, probably more out of economical issue. It is less expensive to have a big central system I guess.

And your point may not be valid even if he had a few independant systems. Assuming he was doing the regular maintenance shedule of replacing carbon, what is to say that he would not have put new fresh carbon in all of his independant tanks killing everyting anyway?

Originally Posted by Myka

Store owners should know better than to put $20K of coral in one system - that's a really bad idea. That's called laziness...it is easier to maintain one or two big systems than several smaller ones. You can't purchase much in the way of insurance on live corals or fish, so they have to create their own types of insurance. Multiple systems is the best insurance they can get. I still feel darn awful for the store owner who lost this huge investment, as well as the animals that died though. That is awful.

[daniella3d]

I got a reply from Kent Marine. They requested that I send a sample of the carbon (understandable) and the bar code on the product, plus they want to see pics of the corals that have died and what ever receipt I have.

Of course I don't have receipt for most of my corals because some where bought like 2 years ago or at least more than one year. Some were bought as group buy and I was not the one with the invoice, and finally some were bought from other reefers and I don't have receipts for those. But I think that from the pics they can make out what is the value of the coral anyway.

They seem nice and offered me good advices on how to bring my system back to normal, lower the light for a few weeks until the corals recover, use polyfilter to remove what ever contaminant is in the water, feed corals with vitamine and food and replenish trace element that the polyfilter will remove. Seem like a good plan.

I will be sending them the sample of the carbon and the documents this week.

They said that polyfilter will remove heavy metal and contaminants if that is the problem so I am going to buy this stuff tomorrow and do another water change.

As soon as I find out what is the problem, I will post here.

Question here..if it is copper or other heavy metal, will polyfilter remove it from my liverock as well or will I have to replace my liverock?

[daniella3d]

Not possible in my case because i put the carbon in the evening where there was just the actinic T5 on, then when I woke up the light was not even on yet, but I could see something was wrong. EAch morning when I wake up the first thing I do is to check my aquariums.

It must be something else. I do not beleive that 8 hours of Kent carbon could have stripped so much from my water than corals were dying. I used carbon on regular basis since the beginning of that tank, but was using Seachem.

I beleive that something far more serious hapened here with some batch of Kent carbon. It could be some heavy metal, as I don't think that carbon can absorb copper or other toxic metal so it could have leached something like that. I just got my water analysed for heavy metal 3 weeks ago and it was perfect. I will have it check again just to be on the safe side.

When I saw this I immeditaly removed the carbon and did a 30% water change. That was the only thing I had done to the tank so it was the first thing I removed.

Originally Posted by jjntm

My buddy rob We believe it is just that the carbon stripped the water too clean and allowed excessive light penetration which bleached the corals