I think my tank is dying

[Tokash23]

Just a thought but check your source water i just went through something similar and turns out my rodi was putting out 3tds water. I switched to distilled for the time being until i can get new filters in and things have drastically improved over the last month. Just my 2 cents

 

[saltnewb]

Here is the front and side shot of the tank.

In regards to feeding, I feed once a day, mainly in the morning time. Test kit that I have is API. I forgot I have a Salifert Phosphate kit and will use that right now and see what it says.

The nitrate drop was over the course of about 3-4weeks. Can’t remember when I bought it, but I’m pretty sure it was in January. I don’t have any way to dose it other than pour it in the tank, so I pour it either in the return tube or the pump that pumps water to the HOB refuge.

 

[saltnewb]

Phosphates look to be .25, which is good correct?

 

[saltnewb]

It’s like a buffet of testing.

 

[saltnewb]

Oh and there are no cleaning chemicals used around the tank. My wife is really into Norwex and they are strict on only using water to clean with.

 

[saltnewb]

TDS out the tap is 680...after it goes through my RO unit it is 23 and I’ve been using it for the past year without any issues. Cleaning and setting up my canister filter with carbon in it right now and will have that running soon. Because it is such a small tank I’ll be turning off the powerheads so it isn’t a hurricane in there.

 

[brandon429]

Hey that looks great. Really good live rock, yep for sure on the above. I'd rip clean the whole tank via the sand rinse thread, and set up a cloudless perfection nano with all new water, talk about a tuneup 3.0 refresher. Incremental approaches take time to amount to what a single rip cleaning will do on a given afternoon. I run them for fun, preemptively in a 12 yr old nano, just to show they're harmless and to add to the sand rinse thread. Parted cleanings are the hidden secret to nano reefing long term, a cheat anyone can use if needed...the lucky won't ever need.


After a correct order of ops thorough parted cleaning, reinstate with new water and several zoanthid frags. This saves you from having to test, because a rip clean makes your params match new mixed water, they're fixed. All algae is wiped clean, sand is cloudless not cloudy if disturbed. Tank is upgraded, refreshed after a parted cleaning. If you did ten thousand of them, then you've done ten thousand cpr strokes on your nano and it's helpful, not harmful. I say we rip clean round one. My first round one was in 2004


Consider rip cleaning, then tinkering with params from the clean condition. Much better than catch-up the other way, which leaves the cloudy bed.

 

[brandon429]

your tank isn't dying at all hope that helps. It could go longer without intervention, but nows the time to practice making the aquarium to run as you will it.

 

[saltnewb]

Never heard of rip cleaning before. I’ll have to check that out.

Thanks for the help.

I’ve started with water changes and running carbon through a canister filter. I’ll monitor for a couple days and see if there is any improvement.

 

[brandon429]

these are the exact steps if you ever want to try it, based on your pics:

take out fish, hold him alone in tankwater somewhere.

take out the rocks, rinse them off briskly in clean new saltwater, making sure no detritus is stuck up under them from sitting, rinse rinse rinse heartily using only saltwater on the rocks, set them aside.

drain out all the water now, leaving only the mud bed.

remove all the sand into a rinse container, and rinse in tap water until the sand is 1500% cloudless, about 40 mins of straight rinsing, its a a lot. it takes me half an hour to cleanly rinse five pounds of sand, by cloudless I don't mean a 4% cloud. 1 million percent rinsed cloudless, no form of hand turning in the filled rinse container yields a cloud, that clean. blasted, ripped clean sand. you can dump it into anything and it doesn't cloud, it snowglobes. *after you have rinsed clean with tap, then use saltwater in the final sand rinse for obvious reasons. its now ready for re use.

clean the whole aquarium and pumps and filters out now that its taken apart. wipe the algae growths off the bottom glass/wet paper towel of peroxide or vinegar. rinse it out, prepare to refill.

now you have a perfectly clean tank awaiting reassembly, and no portion of your assembly has a cloud...rocks and sand cannot cloud.

put the sand in the tank

set the rock back in, fill up the tank with all new water, nothing clouds.

you now have perfect water, perfect sand, rocks and sand that kept their bacteria, and acclimate the fish back in. put in a hundred bucks of zoanthid frags/ready to go. you have no algae fuel at all, the tank's filtration doesn't care if you clean it (it works better after pores are reinstated in fact) and every step in a rip cleaning is good for a nano reef, not bad for it.

every cheat we use in reefing (skimmers, carbon dosing, filtration, refugiums and various plant arrangements et al) are incremental steps to try and attain or sustain the condition that a simple rip cleaning causes in one pass.

nano's have it so easy...as soon as you add too many gallons to rip clean, you get into the zone of the tank telling one how its going to run vs the other which you can easily command due to easy access.

*lol not everyone wants to attack their sandbed, its against the grain of norm for sure. there are much calmer means to use if this one feels weird. once you do a rip cleaning, the next ten are nbd only #1 feels like you are breaking every reef rule ever made.

Here's the no mini cycle proof
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/t...ead-aka-one-against-many.230281/#post-2681445

 

[netdawg]

This sort of thing happened to me when I had softies in my cube a number of years ago... turned out to be two things; one self induced.

Use a volt meter and check your tank for a possible heater or pump leaking voltage into the water. It should be low if happening and make sure you force the heater to kick on when testing. If it reads voltage, turn one device off at a time until you find the culprit. That's what started my nightmare...

I chanced what I thought were ghost param issues in the tank until I ended up starving my softies. I had Palys and Zoas and even Zen in the tank, the combo of the voltage and what i think ended up chemical warfare to compete for nutrient caused be to reduce to only Zoas.

Good Luck!

 

[Luno]

Phosphates look to be .25, which is good correct?

0.25 phosphate is too high! It shouldn't be over 0.1. It may not be your issue but I would definitely be working to bring that down

 

[Luno]

I wouldnt be taking your sandbed out and Rinsing it in tapwater and putting it back in, you will most likely create a new mini cycle which won't be great for the tank. You don't want to be cleaning your tank to that degree regularly as previously posted. It's an ecosystem you want the system to be able to handle itself. Not take out and remove all the good bacteria and nutrients with the bad. Dong this sort of cleaning of a tank all I can see is a tank never reaching maturity.

You didn't mention if you ran carbon or not? I would be running carbon, bringing down your phosphate. What's your waterchange and maintenance schedule look like?

 

[saltnewb]

Rip cleaning sounds like a lot of work, but if it’s effective in the long run I can see the advantages for it.

As far as running carbon, it’s been rare, because I haven’t seen any need to until whatever is going on in my tank now. My water change maintenance schedule could definitely improve. I clean the protein skimmer every couple weeks, powerheads were recently, like 2 or 3 weeks ago, replaced so haven’t cleaned them yet. Never cleaned the heater and I replace GFO once a month. I don’t have any dosers or anything to House the GFO or carbon, so the GFO is packed on the bottom of the HOB fuge making the tank water pass through it before it goes through the rest of the fuge. The carbon is in a canister filter that also has bio pellets in it. It’s been running all day and was reminded why I put it away. Super loud cause it needs a new impeller, but it’s working.

 

[40B Knasty]

Looking at stray voltage, nitrate shock, low O², to much GFO, GFO getting tumbled to hard causing the dust to go in the water column, your water being so yellow tinted from high nitrates and phosphates that your lights par has been greatly reduced to not feed the zooxanthellae, bugs, bad parameter(s), or a shrimp, starfish, fish, crab bothering them.
I would start simple. Good carbon like BRS Rox. 08(half cup per 50gallons), a bottle of Nite-Out ll, increase surface tension, and a water change every 2-3 days of 15-25%.
Check for stray volts

 

[O'l Salty]

Don't change anything fast. Your parameters don't look horrible. I'd get rid of the GFO immediately. Keep the tank stable and make small changes over a period of time, weeks to months. I prefer phos around .1 and if I need to dose I use Seachem Flourish Phosphate. But go really slow with that.

 

[tgrick]

It's hard to tell in a picture but how is your water flow? I agree with removing GFO and running carbon. I also agree with water changes. Nitrates and PO4 levels should not be the cause of these issues. Did a "pest control" man makes their rounds???

 

[saltnewb]

No pest control people around my property. Flow is good I suppose. I have the inlet from the HOB refuge and two powerheads that alternate in there. I’m setting up a qt tank with fresh saltwater and pulling all the frags and see if they open up...they should in clean water.

 

[Sarah24!]

Your calcium levels and alk levels are not super super low but every tank is different. My tank usually run between 480-500 calcium and between 10–12 on alk, but my tank is 240 gallons so it’s different. The smaller the tank the more one little thing will destroy your ocean. It would be good to change your carbon out as a precaution. Install new carbon (rinse it first ) and, have your lfs test your water to see if their numbers match yours. It would good to do water changes every 1 to 2 weeks. I do mine every three to 4 weeks and it’s usually 60-75 gallons. I would also turn your lights down to give the corals time to rest also.

 

[UM Aquarium Club]

Unless theres been a huge swing in calcium/alk levels usually I wouldn't expect that the be the issue. Corals can usually tolerate low levels as long as it isn't a drastic change. We've measured calcium as low as 320 in a coral tank we have and while not ideal (been dosing and plan to set up a reactor soon) it didn't really cause deteriorating health in most of our coral.