woodenkey
New Member
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2021
- Messages
- 15
- Reaction score
- 45
- Location
- Grand Junction
- What state or country do you live in
- Colorado
Pretty sad and embarrassing at the same time to post, but figure lessons learned can be from the misfortune of others.
My tank is still fairly new, with a few fish and small candy coral, etc.
Anyway, I noticed that the coral was over time slowly starting to shrink up and bought a more reliable alkalinity test (vs. my API) and showed that the alkalinity was around 6.5. I wanted to raise it up to about 8-9, and saw some posts about alkalinity calculators for baking soda dosing. Well needless to say, I inadvertently used the wrong calculator (liquid pre-mixed vs. dry) and overdosed to ~14 hardness. I did an immediate 20% water change at the time, brought it down to about 12.5. The next day, fish were fine, eating, nothing to note (pH was around 8.1, temperature 78, etc.)
However, this morning all the fish were dead. My candy coral was showing signs of skeleton too. My sea urchin was showing a little stress with loss of some spines. Clean up crew seemed ok. I moved the urchin and coral to my frag tank.
I have a refugium which runs at night, and didn't have my protein skimmer on at the time during the night...so not sure if there was some sea-saw of a pH swing, or just a delayed response to the high alkalinity. I lost my clown, chromis, and royal gramma...feel awful about this foolish mistake. I even told myself, seems like a lot of baking soda to add.....
Anyway, if any others are wanting to make adjustments, and just "aren't sure", don't know "why"...reach out so you can hopefully avoid a similar error!
My tank is still fairly new, with a few fish and small candy coral, etc.
Anyway, I noticed that the coral was over time slowly starting to shrink up and bought a more reliable alkalinity test (vs. my API) and showed that the alkalinity was around 6.5. I wanted to raise it up to about 8-9, and saw some posts about alkalinity calculators for baking soda dosing. Well needless to say, I inadvertently used the wrong calculator (liquid pre-mixed vs. dry) and overdosed to ~14 hardness. I did an immediate 20% water change at the time, brought it down to about 12.5. The next day, fish were fine, eating, nothing to note (pH was around 8.1, temperature 78, etc.)
However, this morning all the fish were dead. My candy coral was showing signs of skeleton too. My sea urchin was showing a little stress with loss of some spines. Clean up crew seemed ok. I moved the urchin and coral to my frag tank.
I have a refugium which runs at night, and didn't have my protein skimmer on at the time during the night...so not sure if there was some sea-saw of a pH swing, or just a delayed response to the high alkalinity. I lost my clown, chromis, and royal gramma...feel awful about this foolish mistake. I even told myself, seems like a lot of baking soda to add.....
Anyway, if any others are wanting to make adjustments, and just "aren't sure", don't know "why"...reach out so you can hopefully avoid a similar error!
