OP
OP
Crisis officially averted! Dr Tim’s bacteria starter and just leaving things alone did the trick. Thanks everyone for the great advice!So recently I decided it was time to upgrade my 40 gallon reef system to a 60 gallon reef system. So far everything looks amazing. However I had a random ammonia spike. I used to not have a skimmer or media reactor till now. The system had been running for two years! So it’s very well established. When I moved everything I even kept all the old water and moved it along with the sand. I added 2 new rocks and 2 more bags of new carribsea live sand.
When I switched everything over my 6 line wrasse went missing. I assumed he either burried himself in the sand or hid in a rock and got stuck there and possibly died. The tank has been running about 3 weeks and no sign of him! So I presume dead. I looked everywhere and can’t find him. This is my best guess of where the ammonia may be coming from. I have all kinds of corals, mostly soft. A flame hawkish, 2 clowns, a flame angel, a baby blue tang that’s less than an 1” big (that yes I know will outgrow the tank one day and I do plan to go bigger), a diamond back goby, a cleaner shrimp, 2 emerald crabs, 8-12 turbo snails, 10 nassarious snails, 1 tiger conch, 1 tuxedo urchin, 1 orange linka starfish, and 2 long tentacle anemones. Nothing is acting weird, all very very active! Everything is open and happy looking.
The day I noticed this I did a water change right away and my darn Hygger heater decided to act up and nearly killed everything in my tank! The heater was fully submerged the whole time while I ran to the store to grab emergency salt and some connections to my pump because I just invested in a RO DI unit instead of jugs of distilled water. I caught it when the temp hit 95 (I’ve since bought a temp controller eventhough one is built into my Hygger heater ). The only thing that died from that disaster was my pulsing Xenia that I had JUST got. Everything else survived. I have a Refugium with Chaeto as well. The spike was before the heater incident anyways but I’m sure it didn’t help! I also got a few other new corals as I mainly had mushrooms before.
My parameters are:
Ammonia 0.5 on first day then 0.25 after change, then 0.5 again and did another change, now 1-2!!!!
Nitrite 0
Nitrate 10
PH 8.0
Phosphate 0.25
Calcium 33 (640) (I know this is high and that’s a whole other issue)
KH 8 drops 143.2
Magnesium 1260
I use top marine reef salt.
What can I do? I’m going to literally die if I lose everything… I’ve been dosing prime daily, I ordered ammlock (which I heavily read reviews on, it comes tomorrow), I purchased dr Tim’s bacteria starter which is on its way, and lastly I purchased a Red Sea test kid since the one I’m using is api and I’m questioning at this point if it’s accurate, which is also on its way.
Here’s my tank and sump.
