On going issues with some SPS

[ashr]

Yeah alk is too high, nutrients are too low. Lighting is too high also. I have that fixture and am running it 50% on a 90 gal. So with your lights and and alk you are telling corals to grow, but no fuel in the tank. Ditch the gfo and you could use another powerhead.

I could lower the % of light but I have heard lots of ppl running 100% but I could turn her down a bit and see how it goes. How high off the water are you running it?

 

[N4sty T4te]

Are your caps very pale before they start growing algae and dying? I had a green cap when I started my current SPS tank that was almost white it was so pale. I tried keeping my nutrients as low as possible, 0/0 PO4/NO3.

Lost some acros before I started dosing KNO3 (stump remover) and feeding much more. Now I'm 5-10 NO3, 0.018 PO4 and all my acros and montipora plates are richly colored and growing well.

The biggest mistake in the SPS hobby was the belief that these corals needed ultra clean water.

As an aside, don't completely ditch your GFO. I keep mine switched off and will run it for a few days when my PO4 levels get above 0.03 ppm.

I've been doing great keeping everything in that nutrient window I listed above.

I completely agree, I wasn't getting hardly any growth and extremely poor coloration before I decided to feed 4x as much and started dosing Po4 and No3.

 

[Scott.h]

I could lower the % of light but I have heard lots of ppl running 100% but I could turn her down a bit and see how it goes. How high off the water are you running it?

its 12" from the top of the tank. My rock work stops about halfway up the tank. At 53% I was about 250 par at the top of the rocks. I have high end sps that are doing good where they are. They could take more, but don't need it. Half the lps closer to the bottom we're getting to much light at 56% and I've lowered it to 50%. That fixture puts out a lot of light. With your no3 and po4 at a higher level they could probably handle more.

If you are familiar with cherry corals I was in there a few weeks ago and tested each of their systems. They are all t5 with reef bright strips supplemented. Their highest lit tank, including their sps tank was 200 par. Their lps system was like 25-30 par. we both got a chuckle out of it. Nitrates at about 5.

None the less I think it's a combo of all of the above previously mentioned.

 

[BoomCorals]

The biggest mistake in the SPS hobby was the belief that these corals needed ultra clean water.

This is so true. I have seen many people with 0 phos and 0 nitrate that can't figure out why their SPS won't thrive.

 

[markalot]

Be careful dosing NO3, like with stump remover. Do it as a last resort but understand what you are doing and why. It works well in tanks with a steady phosphate load but if you have low phosphates and dose nitrates you risk driving PO4 too low again. Generally you don't want to mess with these kinds of solutions until you know how the tank is running and what it needs. I dose CaNO3 in my 150 but only after ensuring I had positive PO4 and it wasn't falling after dosing NO3.

The Chemipure products contain GFO, ditch it and pretty much everything else, it's not really needed at this point. Feed the tank, adjust the lights so things aren't getting cooked, and you should find success. If your nutrients end up getting too high you might have browner corals or algae issues but they won't die like they are now.