!!!!??? It's happening again!

[Reef Pilot]

Sure does seem like something is leaching (or accumulating) in your water. It was corrected for a while with massive water changes, and then came back. You could try the massive water changes again, to see if again that fixes it, at least for a while.

Meanwhile, would keep testing your water. Not sure if our standard copper water tests are granular enough at the low range, but might be worth doing if you have them.

Alk swings are not good, for sure, but hard to believe it would cause RTN to that extent though, and so suddenly. I have had swings between 7 - 9, but no effects that I could see.

And hope you are past that hydrogen sulphide stuff with your pellet reactor. I definitely don't like the recirculating types. As others have said, would ditch that for a while, too, until you can figure out what is going on. Your higher phosphates are not good either, but again, shouldn't have caused the sudden RTN, I don't think.

Anyway, keep us informed on what you find. We all want to learn from this, if we can.

[pinkreef]

Ive been watching a tank (established for years) do what your is doing since they added biopellets. all sps are receding. what brand are you using?

[Seriak]

People tend to underestimate what a change in Alk can really do to a tank especially if you are running Bio Pellets. Whenever my Alk started to approach 8 my tips would burn and I would get STN on my SPS. When I corrected it over a couple days the other way with water changes I sometimes ended up with RTN on some SPS.

[straightrazorguy]

+1 on the Alk swings. I've had SPS RTN on me with less of a swing than what you mentioned.

[brotherd]

I think for sps keepers this is a very important topic / thread that needs to be followed closely.

[brotherd]

Crazy thought but do you use a home cleaning service or anyone in the home spraying anything that you don't know about?

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by pinkreef

Ive been watching a tank (established for years) do what your is doing since they added biopellets. all sps are receding. what brand are you using?

Bulk reef supply. What's head scratching about this is that other than a brief window when I was repairing my biopellet reactor, my tank has never not had biopellets. They've been on the tank longer than I've had any of my corals, so my dinner plate sized colonies grew from frags in a pellet dosed system.

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

Sure does seem like something is leaching (or accumulating) in your water. It was corrected for a while with massive water changes, and then came back. You could try the massive water changes again, to see if again that fixes it, at least for a while.

Meanwhile, would keep testing your water. Not sure if our standard copper water tests are granular enough at the low range, but might be worth doing if you have them.

Alk swings are not good, for sure, but hard to believe it would cause RTN to that extent though, and so suddenly. I have had swings between 7 - 9, but no effects that I could see.

And hope you are past that hydrogen sulphide stuff with your pellet reactor. I definitely don't like the recirculating types. As others have said, would ditch that for a while, too, until you can figure out what is going on. Your higher phosphates are not good either, but again, shouldn't have caused the sudden RTN, I don't think.

Anyway, keep us informed on what you find. We all want to learn from this, if we can.

I ordered the kit from the states to do a full panel on my water. I got two so I could send a sample of pre and post water change water. They'll test for all the things we normally test for, as well as copper, iron, and other other trace elements that you couldn't reliably test for with a home hobby kit that could be toxic at high levels. If I can at least eliminate the basic chemistry, I'll know what this isn't. And yah, this reactor isn't long for this world. It's working in as much as nothing is clogged and the pellets are tumbling (so no hydrogen sulphide), but if my water chemistry comes back normal, I'm probably done with pellets for good.

Originally Posted by Seriak

People tend to underestimate what a change in Alk can really do to a tank especially if you are running Bio Pellets. Whenever my Alk started to approach 8 my tips would burn and I would get STN on my SPS. When I corrected it over a couple days the other way with water changes I sometimes ended up with RTN on some SPS.

Originally Posted by straightrazorguy

+1 on the Alk swings. I've had SPS RTN on me with less of a swing than what you mentioned.

I hope you guys are right, though why now after 2 years the tank would become this sensitive to alkalinity when it's gotten as high as 9 in the past with 10 times the volume of pellets in the reactor with no problems is confusing. I just wish I had a way to be figure out causative relationships and not just correlated ones. My alk would have gone from 7.5 to 8.5 over the course of 8 days (I tested April 26th and again on May 4th), but I don't know if that was a sudden spike or if it gained a bit every day. I also haven't changed the alkalinity settings on the doser since... I think April 12th (that weekend anyway) and the rate the volume in the container has been falling has remained constant. I'm mixing my dosing solution using a scale and carefully measured volumes of RO/DI water, so I'm confident the concentration in the dosing solution has remained constant.

It's possible my doser freaked out and OD'd the tank, but since turning off the alkalinity pump almost 48 hours ago, the dKH in my tank has only fallen from 8.5 to 7.23. That's a shockingly small amount of consumption for my tank. After I did all those massive water changes and things started to heal and grow again, I was losing 1.7dKH every 24 hours without dosing.

I'm presently stuck not being able to tell if the alkalinity spike caused the damage, or if the growth shut down for another reason, which caused the constant amount I think I've been dosing since mid-April to spike the levels. Basically, is it a symptom or is it the cause... Hopefully the commercial tests I'm going to do will help narrow it down.

The dKH has only been below 8 for about 24 hours, so we'll see if things start to improve. Even corals that never got damaged in the first round are damaged now, so at least I have a lot of indicators against which to measure this. If this is an alk/biopellet interaction, oh man that's the end of biopellets for me. not being able to go above 8dKH on threat of total reef collapse is an untenable position to be in, especially considering the amount of warning the corals give me before losing significant percentages of their tissue. The recovery (if any ever happens) to some of my biggest pieces will be measured in years.

Originally Posted by brotherd

Crazy thought but do you use a home cleaning service or anyone in the home spraying anything that you don't know about?

I've talked with my cleaning lady at length about this. She closes all the cabinet doors (upper and lower) when she cleans my house, wipes down the outside of the aquarium glass with nothing more than a damp cloth that she then buffs with a dry cloth, and she damp mops the floor with just water. Once a month she'll add a tiny amount of vinegar to the water she uses on the ceramic tiles. The only place she uses solvents that could be dangerous to the tank are in the upstairs bathrooms that get used the most, and she changes her gloves to do that.

[pinkreef]

do you use vertex?
thats the one they are using in the particular tank. may be a fluke
but it is happenning since they added the vertex biopellets in a reactor

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by pinkreef

do you use vertex?
thats the one they are using in the particular tank. may be a fluke
but it is happenning since they added the vertex biopellets in a reactor

What's in there now is 100% the Bulk Reef Supply brand, though for about a year before this all started there was a blend of Bulk reef supply and Vertex in there.

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

why would "sps guys" purposly keep a low alk tank, alk is one of the main building blocks in coral growth, if anything we would tand to keep it higher.

I agree with Brad, that swing over weeks isn't a factor, but what was you max alk level or do you know. I have seen big tanks done in by Alk burn but it wasn't realy fromt he level just going to high, but rather the Alk up powder not being mixed properly and landing on the corals. kinda looks like the tips start to melt and get stringy. I tried to find some pictures of the sump/dosing set up you have to see the locations you add your stuff, but couldn't find any. you young kids put so much stuff into your tanks now days it makes it hard anyways, GFO, Bioballs, ect....

also another thing is temp, it will do the same thing, have you had any spikes laitly? here is a pic of what temp did to my tank years ago

it started out with just the tips like an Alk burn then the rest started slughing off here was the end result.

Steve

Those pictures made me feel sick. I would have quit if that happened to me, though I'm headed there just in much slower motion. My Apex logs the temp of my tank but it only stores 7 days at a stretch, I try and download it at least once a week, but I've got a couple of gaps in the month of April. My the highest temp I've got a record for since the beginning of April was 26.5 and my lowest temp was 25.00. It only got up to 26.5 once on a sunny day when I wasn't home so all the windows in the house were closed and my cleaning lady closed all 4 upper cabinet doors (I usually leave the office side doors open to keep my radions cool).

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

Also... hope it is not your cowfish getting a taste of your corals, and then chewing on the SPS tips when he gets hungry...

I'm gonna be real honest, he's definitely started doing that to one colony that's been pretty hard hit by all of this and he's not helping at all. However, his chew marks are very distinctive looking, and very different from what's happening to the rest of the corals. When he bites it he leaves the tips looking crushed and tapered, and he's only been biting the tips of that one colony. While growth tips on the rest of them are dying, the skeleton underneath isn't damaged, and in many places there will still be a little bit of tissue right at the tip while a ring around it will die (or just a small chunk of tissue on every single corallite cup will die, making it look like it's been raked over a cheese grater). Most of my stag corals are also losing whole patches of tissue at random places along the branches, in places his mouth couldn't reach if he tried. I work from home right next to the tank as well, so I'm pretty sure I'd see him doing it it if he was causing this much damage.

That one coral he nibbles on handled it no problem before this all started because it's huge and he preferentially chews on one or two branches, but at this point it's half dead. The two issues working together are going to send it over the edge I'm pretty sure. If I could find a good home for this fish, I'd do it, but alas no one seems to want a 10", definitely not reef safe cowfish lol.

I picked up a poly-filter pad and put it against a baffle in my sump so that 100% of the water in my tank has to flow through it. I'm not sure how much heavy metal there needs to be in the water to cause a noticeable colour change, but we'll see what it looks like tomorrow.

[asylumdown]

I'm in more of an emergency situation than I thought:



I need to start seriously looking in to re-homing some fish here. Testing for ammonia didn't even occur to me because this tank is two years old. All fish alive and accounted for, all inverts alive and accounted for, I haven't changed feeding patterns in months (I actually feed a bit less now)... the only thing I can think is the chemi-clean treatment I did to get the cyano under control after this all got out of hand the first time, but that was in March. If that caused a cycle shouldn't it be done by now? At the very least my corals shouldn't have been growing and improving for the whole month of April?

Gaaaaack. Cause or symptom?!?