Well, I've been making many changes to my tank recently, trying to track down whatever is making my corals angry. My first suspicion was that tin had made its way back into the system, so I finally used the red sea sump mod kit sitting on my desk and removed the half-broken glass left from installing the reef mat and also the Neptune flowmeter since one screw had a touch of rust and then I sent in a Triton ICP test on the aquarium. I then sent in an ATI test on my mixed saltwater and RO water.
While waiting on test results I explored other possibilities. It's summer here, so the tank had gotten hot, primarily due to me bringing in saltwater from the mixing tank and not checking the temperature. It's not a problem I had thought about simply because it's heated during the winter and this is the first summer I've had both an aquarium and a garage mixing station, it raised the water to 82 degrees for about 30 minutes as it took that long for me to get it cooled back down using an ice chest block wrapped in ziplock bags in the sump. So that is issue 1, but other than that one instance (which was 2 weeks ago now) water temperature has stayed between 78 and 80 though I typically like to keep the aquarium at 79, it's 105 outside so I am pretty happy about keeping it 80 or below.
Issue 2 is stray voltage. A friend told me to test for it, so I got out my old school multimeter and gave it a read. Voltagewise I am getting about 1.5v in the water when the return pump is on. Now I know that's not a lot and I'm not seeing any amperage in the water so it's probably fine, but my return pump is from 2015 and the flow from it was way down, below thresholds for my system, so I decided to just replace it anyway.
I decided to replace it with a Sicce Silent 4 and let me tell you, at first this thing was NOT silent. After a weekend though it did whatever breaking in it decided and it's pretty quiet now, not as quiet as my old various 4 was .. my old pump was only pushing up 300 gallons and this one is pushing twice that easy.
Now I have another problem, microbubbles. Ever since I changed the pump I am getting a lot of microbubbles from my skimmer. I wasn't getting ANY with my old return pump and I'm not sure why changing the return pump would cause microbubbles to enter the display from the skimmer.
I've tried lowering the water level to create more of a lip at the baffle. I've tried raising the water lever to give the pump more draw down and give the bubbles more room to escape. Nothing seems to matter except turning the skimmer off.
I have a couple of different sponges coming to try out to see if they help with the bubbles and an inline ball valve to put on the pump to try to slow down the return if needed .. so I'll keep this thread up to date if they make a difference.
Last night the ICP results came back for the display I have them attached below. As far as water quality goes I don't see anything there that would cause my Gonis to close up like they are. So I am inclined to believe it's from the rise in temperature and possibly the voltage.
