Stony Corals Keep Dying

Seanislav · Oct 5, 2016

I have been on R2R for about a year but not posted until now. I have a 300 gal DD reef. It was an upgrade from a 180 gal system. For the first year, corals of all types thrived. Then earlier this year, growth stopped, and then the sps started dying. All sps died, and several lps died too. Chemistry had slipped, but is back on track...pH 8.2, nitrates undetectable (had reached 5-10), alk 9 (recovering from calcium reactor needing parts replaced), SG 1.025, Calcium was at 410, but dropped last week to 390 (also related to reactor being offline. I keep getting massive cyano blooms in spite of water changes and recently running carbon in the phosphate reactor...and now dosing Red Sea NO3 PO4 X daily. What am I missing? Never had new tank syndrome with this system...now I'm ready to pull out what precious little remains of my hair.

scardall · Oct 5, 2016

what is your phosphate? Would you take a pic of your full tank. (not a blue version)

Seanislav · Oct 6, 2016

Here's the tank...I found out my test kits were all two years or more out of date, so I scrapped them and have been replacing them...PO4 hasn't been replaced yet, so I will need to get my LFS to run it this weekend. It hadn't been detectable before I tossed the test kits, so it moved down the priority list in lieu of the others.

tomtom2245 · Oct 6, 2016

So this is a shot in the dark but you said your alk is recovering, recovering from what values and how big of a swing? Just thinking that maybe an alk swing triggered the SPS to start dying and then that in turn fueled the cyano. Plus the SPS dying would then change your tank's alk/cal/mag consumption rates which would further throw them out of whack.

Piranhapat · Oct 6, 2016

With SPS any swing of a water par won't effect them right away. It usually shows up a few days or week later after you corrected the problem. You will see dying corals,

Seanislav · Oct 11, 2016

tomtom2245 said:
So this is a shot in the dark but you said your alk is recovering, recovering from what values and how big of a swing? Just thinking that maybe an alk swing triggered the SPS to start dying and then that in turn fueled the cyano. Plus the SPS dying would then change your tank's alk/cal/mag consumption rates which would further throw them out of whack.

The alk dropped to 6 back in June...and was back up to about 9 a month later. The calcium reactor would either stick closed or dump CO2. The valve/regulator has been replaced and I put in a pump to supply it (it was originally gravity fed), and a new check valve, since the original was faulty.

justingraham · Oct 11, 2016

Nice tank btw.
So u don't want zero nitrates u want around two to five. To clean of a tank will kill corals.
What type of water do u use in other words what is ur tds?
That is a swing but if done slowly not that bad over a month I think would be acceptable.
What kind of lighting do u use do u need new bulbs?
How's ur flow in the tank? Ur power heads clogged up?
U said u didn't have any problems in the beginning so these are just some things that happen over time that could cause what ur describing
Also welcome to reef to reef

Seanislav · Oct 12, 2016

TDS is 0. There's a meter on the BRS RO/DI unit I got a couple months ago (figuring the 8 year old unit I had had lived a long enough life).

Lighting is 4 80W T5 actinics with 3 250W 20K metal halides (the center unit started acting up, so it was replaced with 2 XR15 Gen 4 Radions a month ago).

Return is a Vectra M1, and internal flow is handled by two VorTech MP60s, programmed with Reeflink to change flow rates and patterns...nothing appears blocked. Even the LFS is scratching their heads, because everything that can be tracked appears normal.