LPS & various Corals dying

[Reef Knub]

Hey gang,

Really could use the community's input here on what y'all think may be some issues with my tank around the root cause of why I'm seeing corals not thriving / slowly dying, as I'm starting to run out of hypothesis as to why myself. I've been able to obtain what I felt are stable & appropriate chemistry parameters over the last two months since I've started dosing ~15 mg of All for Reef each day. Once my tank parameters were in what I've googled to be an appropriate range, I added the below list of corals to my tank last month:

- Two torches (green one is doing great somehow as compared to all the rest of my coral)
- Elegance (much less open that first two weeks)
- Frogspawn (dead but you can see remains / frag in pics)
- Hammer (dead and gone)
- Alveopora (open up half as high as they used to the first two week)
- Red bubble tip anemone (opens up hardly as big as when i bought it)
- bubble coral (bubbles are half the size now than first two weeks)

Fast forward to today yesterday, I've seen a clear decline in the size / happiness of my corals, and the frogspawn, hammer and yellow tipped torch are dead / on their way out .

I've been getting digital chemistry tests done every week for the last 4 weeks, with my most recent reading from yesterday being the below:
Salinity 1.024
pH 8.0
Alkalinkty 250 ppm (jumped up a bit high looks like from my understanding?)
CAlcium 380 ppm
Ammonia 0.2 ppm
Nitrite 0 ppm
Nitrate 5.0 ppm
Phosphate 0.2 ppm

Below are details of my tank setup:

75g display / 20 g sump
Filter cup w/ filter floss
Octo classic 110-s protein skimmer
filter media
Dosing 15 mg All for Reef & 5 mg NoPOX daily
two 165W viparspectra lights (Amazon Link for reference)
two gyre wavemakers & one regular wavemaker to push water to the overflow

Additional various details
- gyre wavemekers running at full speed, wave function
- been dosing API algaefix last handful of days little bit to reduce GHA
- run 4 hours both white & blue lights at 90%. This is when they open up the most
- run 4 hours blue light only in evening (blue set to 100%, white set to 10%)
Tank is 1.5 years old, but only been dosing All for Reef to get coral ready for about 2 months now, maybe 3 months.
- Typically feed 1 cube of mysis shrimp daily, with mixing in two finger pinches of Reef Roids once a week on wknds.

Attached some pics of my tank as well. Input would be super appreciated - running out of ideas of what to tweak!! Going to be trying a 20g water change tmrw

Thanks everyone!!

 

[sunken3]

i don't usually see alk in ppm so i looked up 250ppm - that equals 14dkh... you should be between 7-11 (125-195pmm). that in itself is likely your biggest problem. also, when you're having issues, you should pull back on the supplemental items like algaecide.

 

[Lavey29]

High alk and low nutrients is bad for corals. Your calcium is low along with nitrates. Phosphate slightly high also. LPS like low to moderate flow not gyres at 100% intensity. What par levels do you have in your tank?

 

[sunken3]

also, phosphate is a bit high and ammonia should be undetectable (i believe).

 

[sunken3]

best bet is to do a large water change with lower alk.

 

[Reef Knub]

Thanks guys. Will try the water change tmrw, hopefully that'll lower some of the phosphate and alkalinity lvls.

What should my calcium ideally be at? Should I dose that separately?

 

[sunken3]

Thanks guys. Will try the water change tmrw, hopefully that'll lower some of the phosphate and alkalinity lvls.

What should my calcium ideally be at? Should I dose that separately?

380-450ppm but that is not the reason for your coral issues... #1 is Alk (barring something else we don't know about)