Big Bertha: 180g Build

[forestsofkelp]

I ended up doing a 100% water change, which sucked, but should work to get the K even lower. I am not messing around with my chemistry any more.

Hopefully I can get everything back to normal and sparkly clean. I still have corals losing some tissue and looking mad. Time will tell...

One of my Panta Rhei powerheads also died. 2 year warranty, it's 3 years old. The other one also had an issue. At that price I am not interested in pursuing, so I am switching to good old Tunze. I can get 3x 6105s for less than 2x ECM 42. I popped one in today just to replace the broken one until the new hub version comes out. It's silent with tons of flow.I have a nanostream that is a >5 years old that still works great. Really looking forward to all Tunze. I'll post a photo at the end of the month

 

[forestsofkelp]

I got my potassium down to 435. Woo hoo!
The Nyos salt worked great. My ICP was nearly perfect.
Using B ionic, I got my alk stable and my parameters have been perfect all month with little effort.

The corals were looking really unhappy for a week or two. I was getting lots of algae...like so much it was choking out my coral. Poor to no PE. My mag was dumping algae.

I aggressively tried to absorb phosphates. I also scrubbed/removed algae every other day, and eventually did two super deep cleans back to back. I also turned my UV on (it overheats the tank in the summer). I ran double carbon for two weeks, twice, then back to my normal amounts of media today.

Not sure if it was the cleaning, time, or UV, but 2-3 days after the deep clean+UV on, algae basically stopped growing in new locations. I am now cleaning whatever shows up weekly. The lack of free floating algae stopped tangling up my corals.

So for the last 6 days corals finally started having great PE again and my mag is happy.

Looking forward to new powerhead to ramp up the flow, as I think flow is a huge deal. New fish are coming next week.

Hopefully I can then get another clam or two plus keep growing out my corals/replace the ones I lost.

a terrible experience, could have been worse, but I learned a lot.

These pictures are now, now that it looks good. I didnt take any pictures of it when it was full of algae.

Interestingly some of my corals were really hurting, some were good. Most are back now except my elegance is still grumpy and wont fully extend.