Made a mistake and the tank is suffering a little, could use some advice.

[averagesteve]

Hey all,

So my tank is like 3 or 4 months old. 75g with 30g diy sump. Three fish, two clown and a flame angel, some snails, and two corals and a small bit of GSP.

For the past like 4 weeks, no3 and po4 been testing 0 using both Hannah (high range no3 and low range po4), and Red Sea kits.

About 2 weeks ago, started to get some red cyano. Had some chemiclean on hand so decided to try it out.. oof. Something happened overnight and I woke up to a clogged weir in both the display and sump (from hair algae) and the ato dumped a whole bunch of RO into the system and tanked my salinity from 34ppt to 25ppt and my alk from 9 to 7.0.

Did the 20% water change as recommended (adding the new water back very slowly...) which raised my salinity back to 30ppt but my alk went up to 9.7dhk. Oh boy, my GSP won't open, my hammer looks deflated, and my chalice like 75% bleached. The fish seem ok.

My chemistry is all out of whack now. My salinity is still lower than I'd like it, my alk is way too high. My corals are probably suffering... What should I do here? My salt mixes at a high alk for whatever reason (red sea coral pro) so if I do another WC, it'll just raise the alk more probably, which isn't ideal.

The only other thing I did was start running a reactor with carbon to maybe see if it'll help remove whatever ticked off the corals.

TIA for any advice... I probably should have just removed as much of the red cyano manually before doing the chemi clean. I understand this now.

 

[christianscorals]

at this point i recommend you sit back and wait it out. your corals are in shock and it wont help trying to lower alk or make any more changes

 

[TokenReefer]

I would replace evaporated water with salt water mixed to desired salinity instead of fresh/rodi to bring the salt level back up and as mentioned wait it out

 

[averagesteve]

Thanks. I'm going to wait it out and gradually raise the salinity by adding saltwater to my ato.

 

[MrGisonni]

See if you can get a hold of some natural seawater for a water change. Some stores carry it, or look online. The alk will be around 7.5 +/-

 

[TokenReefer]

I would feed a little heavy until the alk comes down. Just my op but with 0 nutrients and high alk they might want some food; maybe even directly feed them

 

[averagesteve]

I would feed a little heavy until the alk comes down. Just my op but with 0 nutrients and high alk they might want some food; maybe even directly feed them

Will do. I actually did finish up directly feeding them before I made this post as I believe direct feeding bleached corals helps them as their algae isn't feeding them.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

See if you can get a hold of some natural seawater for a water change. Some stores carry it, or look online. The alk will be around 7.5 +/-

Why would that matter vs synthetic seawater?

FWIW, the total alkalinity in real natural seawater at 35 ppt will be below 7 dKH.

 

[fisheriesdoc]

I had a similar situation where freshwater was added instead of salt during a change while I was out of town. I was not able to pull up my salinity fast enough and ended up losing a lot of my coral. If you want to limit the amount of new water going into the tank, you can super saturate saltwater with salt- just keep adding salt to the water until the salt will not mix. You should be able to get it to around 60 ppt without much of a problem. Just add it very slowly because it is potent stuff.

I made a simple excel sheet to help estimate how much water I needed to replace when I was doing this. All you need to know is the volume of water in your tank, your current salinity, the salinity of your new water, and your target salinity. It’s just algebra from there.

 

[averagesteve]

Quick update here. Oh boy things got spicy. I was gradually raising my salinity by adding very salty water to my ATO. Next morning it was still low so I took some tank water, added some salt to it, and then put it back in slowly.. Then my cleaner shrimp died, and everything was looking terrible. Salinity was EVEN LOWER. Ok this isn't possible, I've been adding salt for like 3 days. I recalibrated by Hannah salinity checker because at this point that has to be the problem.. 46ppt after the recalibration..... Oh boy.

There was actually nothing wrong with the tank in the first place my checker just need to be recalibrated. I was adding salt for no reason. Anyway, I made a whole bunch of RO and just replace a gallon of tank water with a gallon of RO water about every 90 minutes. The salinity is currently 38ppt and I'm going to finish getting it down to 35 today.

Now I'm interested in a controller that has an app and salinity and ph probes. Any recommendations?

 

[ninjamyst]

Two things that will help you:

1. Get a refractometer but stop testing your salinity all the time. As long as you have ATO and you have a consistent way to make new water, your salinity not gonna change.

2. Consider changing salt. It is recommended to use salt that matches your tank parameter so you dont get huge spikes when you do water change.

 

[TokenReefer]

I feel for ya; my refractometer fell out of calibration (my fault) and I've been getting my salinity back up all week through 35 ppt ato water. Whoops

 

[averagesteve]

Two things that will help you:

1. Get a refractometer but stop testing your salinity all the time. As long as you have ATO and you have a consistent way to make new water, your salinity not gonna change.

2. Consider changing salt. It is recommended to use salt that matches your tank parameter so you dont get huge spikes when you do water change.

I have a refractometer, just haven't been using it because I have the hannah checker, I have calibration fluid for it too, going to calibrate it and use both. Thanks for the advice. I'm going to research other salts and see what ones are closest to my goal parameters.

 

[TokenReefer]

Just a word of advice; if you base anything on numbers now they may be vastly different when the salinity is correct; if you didn't think of this already...

 

[averagesteve]

Just a word of advice; if you base anything on numbers now they may be vastly different when the salinity is correct; if you didn't think of this already...

I think my first indication that my Hannah checker for salinity lost it's calibration should have been that the alk seemed high when the salinity seemed low. The higher than usual alk should have told me that the salinity was high.. however I'm still kinda new to having an actual successful tank instead of just yoloing a small tank with a HOB, which is what I did in the past.

I just calibrated by refractometer, going to continue to gradually lower my salinity to my target 35 ppt and then tomorrow after it's all settled, retest and record everything.

Edit: Oh and why would high alk signal high salinity to me? Well I don't dose, I maintain right now through small water changes, and my salt mix has higher alk than my tank.

 

[TokenReefer]

Good plan. I've added calibration to my steps going forward; easy to correct if you don't let it slip too far and really only takes a minute (smh)