Need advice, nitrates out of control.

[dangit]

Here’s the light settings

I’ve always heard to slowly ramp your lights up over a few hours hold at peak for a few hours and ramp back down over an hour or so… I’ve always heard it helps mimic nature and is good for your corals. It’s been doing well for me… my Ai primes are settings are below

 

[Enad]

I just want to reiterate what @Treefer32 said in their post. Right now you're just making a lot of reactive changes, which likely won't fix anything.

My key recommendation is to simply do a moderate to large(30-50%) water change once a week and keep to that schedule. It may take a week, or maybe a month for things to stabilize but I promise you'll start seeing a huge improvement.

Also stop dosing anything you may be, let the water changes work for you. A 20gal really has no reason to have anything dosed as a WC is easy to do and will fix almost any issues you're encountering.

Keep up your normal feeding schedule and just let the tank settle in with your weekly water changes. As others have said, nothing happens fast here so while it can be painful to see corals not improving the next day, sometimes there's simply nothing to be done except wait it out. I strongly recommend against bothering the corals by taking them out and dipping, what's happening right now is simple instability which you will remedy by staying on a consistent water change regimen.

Everything you've listed, in terms of parameters, are mostly fine and would not cause such problems in your corals if they were all stable at those levels. My reef is often at 1.23 salinity, and my Phos runs fairly high. I had a small tank where nitrates were consistently 40-50 and it was never a problem. Just focus on stability over reaching certain values. The best part about doing frequent water changes is you can stop worrying so much about your parameters because as long as you're using the same salt mix every week, you will know where your levels stabilize.


Hope this helps!

 

[Pod_01]

My reef is often at 1.23 salinity

Your reef is running at 1.23, I think that should be 1.023. If it is 1.023 and that is relative density you are at 30.6PSU!!!
I like to see a picture of the tank and what is inside. My brain just cannot comprehend that the inhabitants namely invertebrate are happy. Just curious, I get it that there are many ways to run a reef but keeping it at low salinity sounds like unnecessary challenge.

When my salinity gets to 33 PSU many of my corals get really upset. And if I sneeze, my zoa can and will melt at that PSU.

How are you measuring your salinity?
I prefer this from user simplicity and consistency:

Some of my corals at 35 PSU:

As was mentioned the OP needs to slow down and lot of good advice was provided. In my opinion salinity should be raised to 34-35 PSU. Once there observe the tank for week or three and maybe change something else.

 

[AlyciaMarie Verified Admin]

You're reacting vs. making strategic targeted changes.

You got me there My natural reaction is to just fix, fix, fix as fast as I can, but I don't think that's going to fly in this hobby. Thanks for the advice!

Lastly Patience. Nothing happens fast. Stop changing your water chemistry. They need a solid stable environment, doesn't matter how clean or dirty it is right now, they just want to know the house isn't going to keep changing. Would you live in a house and be happy if one day the furnace is on at 90 and the next day it's at 50 degrees. Then tomorrow the shower is 200 degrees and the day after that it's 40 degrees? Then the electricity is sometimes on and sometimes off? No, you'd move out ASAP. Corals can't move out so they just stay ticked off until things stabilize.

THIS is my biggest thing right now. I thought I had patience because I waited sooo long to add anything to the tank, but now that we have what we want in the tank, I feel frantic trying to fix all the things. I now see how that can just make it so much worse.

Thank you everyone for chiming in. I've learned so much just in this small thread. Thank you all for taking time to help me out! Hopefully, I'll be back with a positive update in time.

 

[X-37B]

Well alot of advice now what to do. Stability will fix most issues in any reef system.
What are your desired levels and ranges.
Example SG 1.026-1.027 range. Go for 1.0265 and only adjust if your numbers rise or fall out of your set range. 1.025 -1.026 works just keep it in range. I prefer the first and have ran ocean levels for years.
So:
Temp 77-80
Alk 7-8
Ca 420-450
Mag 1300-1400
No3 < 5
Po4 < 0.1
These are good numbers to start. The main thing is to have a range and a plan to get them back in range when they drift.
Large WC's are not needed on a 20g. I did 2% a month on mine or 2g's.
Run carbon 24/7 on any mixed reef. Only a small amount is needed changed monthly.
A mag level of 1000 is low get it up to 1300+. I have never had an issue with a mag test kit in many years.
This is a classic post. No plan equals no stability which is why people post here.

Im not familar with your light system but without a par meter or years of experience your guessing. My guess is its on the low end.

Flow is critical to move coral waste off of all corals. Get a small powerhead in there to get some flow.

Get a plan from above and proceed. Trying to incorporate 5 different views on the problem only confuses most.

For algae get some more snails and some hernit crabs.

Good luck and you can pm me if you want.

 

[AlyciaMarie Verified Admin]

Flow is critical to move coral waste off of all corals. Get a small powerhead in there to get some flow.

Thanks for your response! I want to ask you specifically about this part of the response. How do you know when the flow that you've got going is where it needs to be? The answer is probably as simple as watching for the way the coral is responding, but with everything being irritated as is, it's hard for me to judge if the flow is helping or hurting. Other than waiting it out, is there a way of knowing if you're providing enough or too much flow?

I've looked into other threads and guides by coral vendors online for light/flow requirements, but I still am finding it hard to gage if what I'm doing would be enough. Maybe I'm overcomplicating this, maybe a video would be helpful?

 

[AlyciaMarie Verified Admin]

There's been a lot of responses on flow in this thread, so here is a short video of what the flow looks like on the Torch and Duncan. And again, the torch may look fine, but it has changed negatively quite a bit in the last few weeks.

 

[Miami Reef]

There's been a lot of responses on flow in this thread, so here is a short video of what the flow looks like on the Torch and Duncan. And again, the torch may look fine, but it has changed negatively quite a bit in the last few weeks.

Flow looks perfect. Corals look much better. Sometimes the answer isn’t always clear. I’m glad things are looking better.

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Flow looks perfect. Corals look much better. Sometimes the answer isn’t always clear. I’m glad things are looking better.

I agree here, we have noticed an almost 180 turn around for our corals, almost all of them are doing a lot better now

 

[AlyciaMarie Verified Admin]

Flow looks perfect. Corals look much better. Sometimes the answer isn’t always clear. I’m glad things are looking better.

Great, thank you! I will say that everything does look better today. The toadstool has is polyps extended today and the Zoas are opening back up.

 

[Treefer32]

Take a breath! Let things ride. I agree with others, after a couple weeks of stability introduce stable routines. Sometimes a table in Excel or a simple notepad near the tank. If you do something with the tank, try doing it the same day every week. (If you can get the same time, great, but at this point, just having a routine is sufficient.)

For example if you're doing weekly water changes of 2 galllons (10%) a week, then try doing most weeks the same day. Lights on and off the same time everyday, try to feed the same time every day. Things like that. (My fish are so programmed at when feeding time is they start to gnaw at the glass if it's 30 seconds past that time).

Corals know when it's bed time too. About 2 hours before my lights turn off everything closes up and looks dead. Next morning they're all wide open and bushy tailed. It's the rhythm of life. Same thing, same time, every day.

If you're testing things, (I wouldn't recommend more than once a week unless you're making corrections). Test things the same day every week so you have data driven trends. Is alk trending down (consumption increasing) is Salinity remaining stable? Are phosphates trending up or down? Etc. Now you can make strategic decisions based on historical data. If over 3 weeks phosphates are continuing to rise, but haven't hit your threshhold yet, then you can research ways to manage phosphates, nitrates, alk, and more.

In the end, enjoy your happy creatures! The life is amazing to see unfold!

 

[Enad]

Glad to hear things are turning around already! Just try to keep things stable, do your water changes and everyone will be happy again soon enough!