Does it get easier?

[Jordan berry]

My tank has been set up now for 2 months. Cycle went perfectly. After that it's been a series of unfortunate events. I got Dino from 1 of my lfs just got to where it seems to be gone and now I have cyano that came in on a rock from the other lfs and all of my corals are looking terrible. I didn't realize matching my alk and calc was important during water changes. I also dipped the corals in seachem reef dip and put them straight into the display tank. Is iodine from that reef dip bad for the tank? At this point it seems like I have put 4 hours plus into researching the tank and maintenance for the last 3 months. Learning is fun it just seems like I will always be struggling to keep things alive instead of being able to appreciate a smooth running tank. My main issue is the bubble magus curve 7 protein skimmer. I dont think cyano would be around if my nutrient export system was working properly. I get it tuned to pull skim mate out. It will work for a few days and than randomly start over flowing. If anyone has any advice all is appreciated. My levels are nitrates 5-10 ppm ammonia and nitrite .005 and 0. My phosphate is at .03. My alk and calc are 9 dkh and 400 calc. Does cyano eat alk and calc extremely fast because my numbers are dropping like rocks and the corals aren't where they are going I'm talking 20 to 30 a day and I only have 5 little softie frags in the tank.... I'm having to dose a lot to keep numbers in the low range and it is raising my ph. Which now sits at 8.3. I use an ro/di filter and mix my water. I have gac in a bag atm and run gfo in a reactor. I am thinking of adding a reactor for gac today. My salinity is 1.025. Sorry for rambling and thank you if anyone read this whole thing. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

 

[TheEngineer]

You'll get into a rhythm with things. I think we all go through that, I certainly did. Eventually you will be able to spot something before it becomes a problem and you'll know what it is and what to do about it.

As to your test results, have you verified the results with another kit or by taking the water to your LFS?

 

[AZDesertRat]

Your reef will go through many stages in the beginning and most test your patience and make you question why you ever got into the hobby. The best thing I can tell you is tough it out, its worth the ups and downs in the long run. As your system matures it becomes more diverse and stable and is able to bounce back and recover from the minor tragedies and stresses. I've been in the hobby over 30 years and the first several were challenging to say the least but the last 15 or so years have been a joy. It's enjoyable when someone new visits the house for the first time and spends hours in front of the reef tanks, especially the kids. It is also fun encouraging others and helping them get started in the hobby, I can't count the number of times I have given away corals or dry goods I no longer use or need to help someone get a new system up and running. Others did the same for me when I was starting out too so its just returning the favor.

If I may make a suggestion, put your location by your avatar, you might be surprised how many others may be in your general area and can help you or give you local advice.

 

[acolotto]

The first year is the toughest. IMO the first year of a reef tank is all trial and error. The first year you will spend learning on how to keep your parameters stable and how to keep inhabitants fat and happy. Every month that goes by you will understand how your tank works better and fixing issues will become way easier. Eventually you should be able to tell when stuff is starting to go bad just by looking at your tank, you will notice when a fish isn't eating, a coral not expanding right. Dont worry it gets easier! That quick of drop off in the parameters is unlikely, id say something with the test kits is off and should get your result verified. Dipping a coral into coral dip then putting straight into tank should not cause any issues as there are plenty of us that do this.

I have some quick questions that could help me and others give you some answers.

What type of test kits are you using?
What is your water change schedule like?
What type of lighting are you using? If t5/mh how old are bulbs and what bulbs are you using?
Cyano is usually a sign of low flow in that area, what are you using the create flow in your tank?
What size tank? Sump/Refugium?
I cant really help with the skimmer, but have heard the bubble magus curves need to be 9" submersed and that there is the possibility the venturi intake can get clogged up with salt crystals (basically check the airline and where it connects that the flow inst being restricted)
Do you dose anything?
How much are you feeding? (How many times a week and what?)
What is your livestock in the tank currently?

 

[Breakthecycle2]

I doubt you had dino's. My guess is it was cyano. I thought I had it after two months of setup too, but it was cyano. All the questions need to be answered in the post before this one.

 

[ilovereefing <3]

Do you have any livestock in the tank? Clean up crew? How big is your tank? What test kits are you using? Was your live rock cured before adding it to the tank? What do you feed and how often?

For your skimmer, it sounds like you may have it set with the water level inside too high, or the skimmer is still breaking itself in. I notice that if I am trying to skim too wet, sometimes it will pull out too much and just overflow. You could try dialing it back a little and see if it continues to overflow. Sometimes, finding that sweet spot can be tough.

Your tank really is quite young, so what you should try to aim for is more stability. I think if your numbers were stable, you'd see less problems, especially with your corals. It is my understanding that softies can be a bit more forgiving when parameters fluctuate, though. Do you have an auto top off? If you do, you could try adding kalkwasser (very slowly) to your ATO rather than dosing for now, as it seems to keep things very stable for me and I have never had to dose yet. When I started using kalkwasser, I started by adding the least amount of kalk to my ATO and testing daily to see if it was keeping my alk and calcium where it should be. If not, I increased by one teaspoon every time I had to refill the reservoir. It took several weeks to find the sweet spot here. I don't know if cyano uses alk and calcium, but I know that for me, even with the presence of some cyano, my parameters are still very stable. The coralline algae in live rock does consume calcium at a pretty alarming rate, so maybe it is your live rock at work here. I am not sure if using kalk is good for small tanks, as it could cause a large swing in parameters for a smaller tank.

I have never matched my calcium and alkalinity to my tank prior to doing a water change, but I do match salinity. However, my total tank volume is around 160 gallons so my weekly water changes do not really change my parameters much.

New tanks go through quite a bit of headaches before things start moving smoothly. I think the key is stability. Once you have found the sweet spot, things will get easier and you just have to make minor adjustments as more livestock or coral is added to the tank. Just remember that nothing good happens fast in reefing. Just take it slow and thing will get easier over time.

 

[Wiz]

Glad your able to ditch the dinos. That took me more than 2 months to get rid of. I agree cyano is usually poor flow. I can't answer for water changes as I rarely did them on my last reef and I've yet tk do one on my 15+ month reef now. the dip should not be an issue. But if you think it is just take a small cup of tank water and dunk the frag a few times before putting it in.
4 hours is nothing when it comes to researching your reef. I spent way more than that my first week. I can't imagine how many hours of research I have in after 9 years of reefing. Thousands!! The skimmer might overflow if you adjust water level or add something to the tank or change media. Try and take notes on what you do to the tank and see if there is a common factor when it happens. 20 to30 a day is crazy. Something is funny about that. I dose quite a bit and the drop is not even close to that . Ph of 8.3 is not bad. And I believe its related to your alk. So if alk drops Im pretty sure ph will too.
It will get easier. A lot of trial and error. A lot of experimenting. A lot of advice and research. If you love it, it is well worth it. If not give up now! Lol
Most time consuming, frustrating, nerveracking, expensive hobby ever! Also the best hobby ever. I love it. What an escape. What beauty, what wonder. A whole world in my living room. :-D:-D good luck and welcome to reefing.
Disclaimer: all above is my opinion;-)

 

[Jordan berry]

It's a 90 gallon tank with a 35 gallon sump. I use 2 reef radiance 165+p lights. I have 2100 gph return pump and 2 jebao rw-8's. My test kits are Hanna alk and phosphate test kit with api back ups. Calc just api. Magnesium I use solider the. Ph is Elos. Nitrate nitrite and ammonia api. I also have the senate reef monitor for ammonia and ph. It says my ph is at almost 8.5. I hope the Elos kit is more accurate. I deffinately had or still have Dino. Pet I and the lfs store in my area is covered. I dosed Dino x for 20 days and did lights out for 3 days followed by only a couple of hours of light for the next 2 weeks. For those 3 weeks I didn't do a water change and I removed my filter sock gfo and gac as recommended by fauna Marin for Dino x. During this te I dosed 2 part and brought my alc up to almost 12 because my calcium was barely reading 400 and I wanted to bring it up but didn't realize I could use just one of the 2 part solutions. Than when I did the 50 percent water change at the end of this with fresh non dosed water is when the the corals all got ticked and are now moving closer to death. I have 2 clown fish 1 azure damsel and 1 shark nose goby. My corals are Ricordea mushrooms, red mushroom, green hairy mushrooms and green nepthea and Zoas. I have about 20 snails and 20 hermits and 2 emerald crabs for my cuc.

 

[acolotto]

We'll if you got your alk up to 12 that's your problem most likely. And after the water change it is at 9ish? That's a huge swing and if that were to happen in my tank id be looking at a lot of dead coral. More then likely with the point your at in your tank there is no reason to dose anything. You should be figuring out how to solve everything manually. To get rid of cyano point powerheads towards it, it happens it area with low flow. Don't need 2 part either, only things using calcium in your tank are the snails. Doesn't seem you have any corals that build skeleton. IMO you are moving to fast only things right now you should be doing is adding fish and corals and keep parameters up with water change. Probably could get away with 20% wc a month and your params should stay near the optimal ranges without any issues. The key is learning how to keep your tank stable, and by adding 2 part, Dino x, and running all the other stuff you are bouncing all the number all over the board. I'd stop doing all of it and only do water changes for the next couple months until you get a better understanding of where you want to keep your parameter so that everything looks the best for our tank. And once you find those numbers out then start using other resources to help you keep this numbers stable. I say this because no one will ever be able to tell you what works best for your tank, we can all help and give ideas to solve the problem but you have to figure out what ranges everything works best in your tank because po4 of .02 is good in my tank but a .04 might be better in yours

 

[Jordan berry]

When I said 4 hours of time I meant minimum 4 hours per day over the last 3 months. The good news is I quit smoking and obsessing over every detail of the tank was the only thing that kept my mind off of craving cigarettes. I hate killing animals from a dog or pharret to a fish or snail. I had a fresh water tank 15 years ago and quit when a power outage killed my live stock while I was out of town. I have killed a couple coral due to learning and an evil damselfish from a failed 2 liter bottle fish trap but those were all mistakes I'm hoping to not repeat. In my fresh water tank I never had an algae problem especially nothing like cyano and Dino. I have too much invested to quit now. My wife would kill me. Lol. Plus the few moments it looked good I knew I was hooked. I think I'm just obsessive compulsive and all of my other hobbies I could learn every detail buy good quality and be set. This hobby I want to replace a $300 skimmer that I bought a month ago and am probably adding a uv sterilizer and either apex gold or da archon controller not knowing if any of them will make a difference because it might help.

 

[Oceansize]

Sounds like your protein skimmer isn't fully broken in yet, for one thing. When they're new, they can fluctuate wildly in the amount of skimmate they produce. Maybe it's more accurate to say it's producing more bubbles when it's new, not more skimmate. Either way, they tend to overflow sporadically when they're new.

Cyano is hard to avoid in the first several months before you've got your nitrate export dialed in. I find that an inline UV lamp helps immensely for this, but that may be overkill when all you really need is patience and frequent water changes. Just don't expect a pristine tank right now, it's gonna be awhile before you've achieved a good balance. You're not done stocking yet which is another reason why stability will be hard to achieve consistently in these early months.

 

[Jordan berry]

Yeah. I didn't realize what alk was. I thought it was fish food and to aim for 180 alk 450 calc was the goal. I also thought 2 part would balance it out. I got up to 192 alk and than when I did the water change like they recommended for that Dino x it dropped to 172. Even during dosing calc never got above 420 where alk shot up like crazy. My corals haven't all died yet but aren't looking any better. I was making it worse by trying to move them to a spot that would be better for them and that just added to their stress. At the moment I run instant ocean salt mix. Should I switch to a reef salt to get numbers closer to what the corals want? Should I just run a little kalk in the ato keep with the salt I have and not dose? I want to get into a routine that keeps my parameters near optimal before adding more coral and watching them die. I will want to do sps in the future and will dose very lightly and monitor numbers to get to the Mount that will get the numbers where they need to be. So I guess the good news is that I figured it out with $100 in corals and didn't make a more expensive mistake. The small colony of Rastas I added after the water change are doing great.

 

[Jordan berry]

Also thank you everyone for your help. It's appreciated. I did add my city and some info to my profile. Hopefully I will find some people locally to chat with that are into this hobby.

 

[Reefrookie220]

I recommend reef crystals salt mix. And go a month with weekly water changes and no dosing. Write results down keep notes and when your levels stabilize and you can figure out the rate your corals use up the elements in the water then try to dose.

Just because Tom's tank has alk at 7 and Joe has his at 9,doesn't mean your corals use at the same rate. Learn your tank over a few months and you'll get a feel for it.

 

[Reefrookie220]

Check Facebook for local reef clubs, also check the club section of the forum

 

[acolotto]

+1 what reefrookie220 said just keep it simple right now.

Just observe and do water changes for now. IME shoot to do at least a 20% water change every month. Do it how ever it suits you maybe 5 gallons a week or just a 20 gallons once a month. What your goal now should be learn what type of fish and coral you are wanting to keep. Then start adding them, slowly though to much at once can throw your params out of whack especially when adding fish. As you add fish and corals your parameters will change, fish will add poop and more food being fed which will increase your nitrates and phosphates. As you add corals like LPS and SPS they use Alk and Ca to build Skelton so the more you add the more that'll be used. These can be counter balanced with water changes which the goal is to replace "dirty" water with new salt water which will have 0 nitrates and phosphates and reef levels of other parameters. Figure out the what you want to keep coral wise that will give you an idea of what parameter you want to keep then get your tank to those levels without dosing anything, just water changes. Reef crystals is a great salt IME and I know a lot of people use Red Sea as well but I've never used it. But in reality basically any salt will provide reef parameters. But with the amount of corals you have at this moment if I was you I would just worry about keeping my nitrates and phosphates near 0 and not ca and alk.