Salinity is low. Aim for 1.026
Roger, I'll continue heading up to 1.025 or 1.026. I had previously used 1.025 since that's what my LFS uses, and I figured it would make acclimation easier.
Alk gained over 2 dkh in a month. Many corals hate alk swings. It will kill them.
Aim to keep this around 8-9. Pick a value. Then keep it stable.
8-9 was my goal, apparently it. got away from me, and I wasn't paying it enough attention. I also figured that a change over 2 months was slow enough that no one would mind.
Even with 4 lights, your par is pretty low on the sand and on some of the mid level rocks. Upper rock numbers are fine. I’m not sure what lights those are but it seems penetration is weak. What lights are they, and what percent are you running the channels at?
They're XR15 G6. Half are the Pro versions and half are Blue version. The Blues are 100% for all colors, and the Pros are 100% on the blues, and 60% on the white/red/greens. The schedule intensity is set to 65% (which gives about 100 micro mol/m^2/s PAR, and I'm using acclimation mode to slowly move from my current low levels to that higher level.
Would I be better moving the corals up on the rock work to get higher PAR? I'm thinking that turning up the lights will also contribute to more algae/whatever growth in the tank, and if I just move the frags up, they'll get more light, but all the algae won't.
My tank is a 75g LPS and my mp40 is on 50% and I run nutrient transport mode. When this was a mixed reef with sps and lps, I had two mp40 both running 50%. Your tank is twice the size as mine and I feel the powerheads are too low. Your torch video has gentle movement but more would not harm it
Ok, I'll try turning up the flow, and see how that goes.
I have a Vectra M2 return, and it's running at 75%. I feel like a lot of my flow is maybe from that. Should I adjust that at all if I turn of the MP40s?
Your tank looks fairly new. It is possibly going through a phase, or hasn’t established itself enough for certain corals yet. It takes up to a year.
It is fairly new. It's about 4 months old.
Do you target feed the corals? A large tank like that can make it difficult for them to catch food if you broadcast feed
I do. I started feeding reefroids 2x per week. I mix about 1/2 Tsp of it with some water, and use a pipet to feed it to the candy cane, blasto, acan, zoas, and torch. My shrimp also love a little nip of it.
I'm also broadcast feeding what I feel is a lot. I have an Avast Plank, and it runs for 25 seconds 5 times a day. It has a mixture of Avast Reef Jersey and TDO pellets in there. I figured that with the Nitrate and Phosphate on the low end, I could feed them that much.
The tank currently houses 2 clownfish, 1 firefish, 1 fox face, 1 royal grama, 2 cleaner shrimp, ~5 astrea, ~5 turbo, ~5 ceriths, 6 trochus snails, and 1 small tuxedo urchin.
I'm running a reef mat currently, because I love how well it keeps the water clean. I figured that it would also help remove uneaten food.
I have a skimmer, but as I mentioned, I have it running w/o the cup currently.
Since my Nitrate and Phosphate have been low, I haven't been doing water changes either. I have a DOS setup for autowater changes, so it's easy to start them again, but I thought that would just lower my nutrients even further.
I noticed in your one pic your coral was covered in algae. How old is your tank and have you been battling Dino's which can cause stress. I had a similar issue when I had a dino breakout and my only defense was to remove my sand bed and add a UV sterilizer. All is good now.
They are. Once a week a so, I give them a blast with a turkey baster and give them some gentle shakes to knock off the algae. I'm not sure if it's dynos, cyano, or what. I'm not entirely sure how to positively identify them. A microscope seems handy, but I haven't found and good references yet to help me ID what I see under there. A lot of the threads I find asking for microscope IDs don't seem to end with any IDs. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places for those.
