@Phoerut
which method did you wind up using / what's the outcome so curious.
Okay so I quietened down after things got heated. I didn’t want to offend anyone that had so kindly come to my rescue but I did keep reading. I’ve made up 100 litres of new seawater. That’s all the capacity I have to store it. Waiting for those to dissolve and heat up to test the salinity was HOURS. It’s cold here in the uk and I had to wait for each 25litre barrel to heat up, to test. One by one. All my spare heaters are very small as they were used in a 50litre tank.
I tested about 3 times a day. Ammonia stayed at 0 for 24 hours. Nitrates 1. Alk keeps dropping down to 6ish (I suck and making all the drops the same size). Magnesium was at 1400 but i stopped testing for it because my focus is making sure it’s safe right now not optimal, just safe. I realised I can’t take on all these problems at once, because I think I shocked my system trying to do this before.
salinity 0.25.
i started to notice in this time that my frogspawn had started to make a recovery, despite the clowns deciding to host it while it was dying. 2 of my mushrooms had also started to recover, along with my leathers. So I decided not to go with the full change as things were clearly improving and I didn’t want to shock them again. I wasn’t confident in my skills to do something like that effectively and I didn’t want to harm the fish. The fish are fine and they are my priority over corals to be honest. I have some sensitive species in there like a orange spot file fish and a mandarin who I’ve trained onto flake, pellet and frozen I really didn’t want to go back to square one with them. Especially the file fish, he was a pain in the butt to get to eat. When I first bought itit went on hunger strike for over a week.
My tank was ugly with bryopsis but everything was still healthy so I don’t even care about the bryopsis coming back right now, that’s something I will tackle naturally with macros or naturally in the future when the tank has stabilised. Any suggestions on ways to deal with this without chemicals would be greatly appreciated.
I am running carbon because those chemicals need out. Micronutrients is a risk I’m willing to take because I think chemicals are probably worse at this point. We can replace micronutrients but the chemicals are in there and they need to go.
I did a gentle 10% water change this morning. I agree this could have been more but I’m trying to avoid any shock here. I did this because the ammonia had creeped up to 0.8. I fed the fish last night so I’m assuming that’s why. Retested and it’s at 0.4 after the change. Not great, will probably do another in a few hours. Nitrate we’re at 2 before the change.
What I think has happened, again any input on this would be great, is I’ve killed my filter bacteria. Ammonia is high nitrates are low. I have filter bacteria in a bottle. Do I add some? If I do, do I turn my UV off so it can settle?
let me know what you guys think. Here’s a recovery pic
