tigé21v
Active Member
Not sure if this is the right forum to post this. If not, Mods please move.
In a matter of less than a month my system went from using north of 2 1/2 gallons of kalk a day to needing no supplementation, and only consuming about 1-2 ppm of alkalinity daily. Growth pretty much seems to have stopped overnight.
The only change I made to the system is I decided to try to clean up my Rubbermaid sump, and put a power head in there to stir things around a bit and started running around 150-200 gph of sump water through a 10 micron sock 24/7. The sump wasn't in that bad of shape, I had cleaned it out via a water change a couple of months ago. I was changing out a 7x14 sock every three or four days. System volume is 450+/- gallons.
I was into it for a few weeks, maybe a month, when things went south.
By the time I realized something was out of whack, alkalinity had risen from a rock-solid 127ppm to 16ppm over the course of little over a week. Which, of course, has led to tip burn on any acros, and even had my stylo colony looking so ragged I gave it away so I wouldn't lose it.
I had noticed my ph was slowly climbing, but nothing dramatic. Maybe an average of 0.1 over the course of a month. ORP was more noticeable, probably a 10-15% rise.
So, I'm left wondering..
Did the constant removal of junk from the water column allow the alk to rise, since there was less stuff in the water decaying?
Or, was the constant removal taking out all the food present in the water column, so the corals started to starve, and that's what stopped the growth?
The tank is fed heavily, daily. Pellets in an auto feeder throughout the day, a sheet of nori or more, and at least a 1"x1"x1" cube of frozen.
Any insight is appreciated.
TIA
In a matter of less than a month my system went from using north of 2 1/2 gallons of kalk a day to needing no supplementation, and only consuming about 1-2 ppm of alkalinity daily. Growth pretty much seems to have stopped overnight.
The only change I made to the system is I decided to try to clean up my Rubbermaid sump, and put a power head in there to stir things around a bit and started running around 150-200 gph of sump water through a 10 micron sock 24/7. The sump wasn't in that bad of shape, I had cleaned it out via a water change a couple of months ago. I was changing out a 7x14 sock every three or four days. System volume is 450+/- gallons.
I was into it for a few weeks, maybe a month, when things went south.
By the time I realized something was out of whack, alkalinity had risen from a rock-solid 127ppm to 16ppm over the course of little over a week. Which, of course, has led to tip burn on any acros, and even had my stylo colony looking so ragged I gave it away so I wouldn't lose it.
I had noticed my ph was slowly climbing, but nothing dramatic. Maybe an average of 0.1 over the course of a month. ORP was more noticeable, probably a 10-15% rise.
So, I'm left wondering..
Did the constant removal of junk from the water column allow the alk to rise, since there was less stuff in the water decaying?
Or, was the constant removal taking out all the food present in the water column, so the corals started to starve, and that's what stopped the growth?
The tank is fed heavily, daily. Pellets in an auto feeder throughout the day, a sheet of nori or more, and at least a 1"x1"x1" cube of frozen.
Any insight is appreciated.
TIA
