Soft Corals Parameters

[Maltese]

Can you please tell me approx how should i maintain my my water parameters in my reef tank i have only soft corals but i'm not pleased especially with my toadstool leather . When i buy it from my lfs it was brilliant long green tentacles but when i put it in my tank 8 months ago never opened i don' know why.

 

[allaboutcorals]

Hey there! Could use a little more information about your setup. Do you know the parameters right now? What kind of lighting? Where is the coral placed? How is the flow?

 

[Clownfish2]

Can you please tell me approx how should i maintain my my water parameters in my reef tank i have only soft corals but i'm not pleased especially with my toadstool leather . When i buy it from my lfs it was brilliant long green tentacles but when i put it in my tank 8 months ago never opened i don' know why.

The key to keeping corals is maintaining constant water parameters and proper spectrum lighting. The way I maintain ALK, CA, and MAG is with 2 part additives such as soda ash, magnesium sulfate and chloride, and calcium. I get mine from BulkReefSupply.com. I use three 1 gallon jugs with the additives in them each connected to a dosing pump. These dosing pumps drip the additives into my sump throughout the day and I maintain constant water parameters. I have kept soft corals such as a goniopora, acan, frogspawn, torch coral with these parameters: ALK 8-9, CA 425, Mag 1350, PH 7.9-8.0. Lighting is very important as well. I use the Radion G4 XR15 on a 8 hour light schedule. For food, I normally do not feed the corals. They get their nutrients from the lights and leftovers from the fish. I dose home grown nannachloropsis phytoplankton to the tank, but I don't believe its a necessity for the corals. Recently I decided to increase PH to 8.3 by running my protein skimmer air intake line to outside. I ran the line through a board and placed it in the sliding tracks of my window and then sealed the outside window cracks with silicone sealant. I maintain a continuous PH of 8.3 now.

 

[norfolkgarden]

As Clownfish2 mentioned, stability of parameters is everything.
The advantage of doing a Softy tank vs SPS is if you have a *temporary* problem with your water the Softies will usually recover instead of dying out completely.

Otherwise they are almost as demanding as SPS.

One nice thing about most softies is not needing a lot of dosing if you do regular water changes.

The SPS suck minerals out of the water to build their hard skeletons. Those minerals need to be constantly replenished with dosing.

We have a 75 gallon tank with 200 pounds of live rock and just 2 MarineLand 400 HOB filters.
The 200 pounds of live rock does most of the biological filtering.
I add Phos Xtrax to screen containers for the HOB filters and change them every week or every other week depending.
(The white beads work better than GFO in the screens.)
Weekly water changes of 10 gallons and thats it.
I work out of town occasionally and can't (lol, not allowed to) have plumbing problems while I'm away.
So no automatic top off, dosing pumps, etc. Everything has to stay pretty simple and manual.
I add a half gallon of RODI water for top off almost every day.
(Or water change and 3 gallons RODI when I get back home...) We keep salinity around 1.022 at full top off so it only creeps up to 1.025 by the time I get back in town.

Can you tell us about your tank?
Size, lighting, water changes, etc.