SPS TANK NIGHTMARE, about to throw in towel!!

[Dooly]

How tall is your tank, how high of the tank are your light mounted? Mine is only 15 inches deep, and lights ate 10' from water as i said. "I usually run WWC at 70% with 6 hrs of t5". Only lowered since sps seemed stressed

Been Using AF for last 4 months.

Its just a saying, i wouldn't do that. I am by no means a noob to the hobby nor sps. I have been doing this for 15 yrs. However never ever have i had so many issues.

what did you use before AF and why did you switch over?

 

[Rams]

PO4/NO3 high compared to alk..when alk is 7-8 PO4 should be 0.01-0.04 and NO3 1-5ppm..when alk is 9-10 your PO4 and NO3 will do ok..I faced similar issue years ago and fixed it with dosing bacteria by reducing PO4/NO3 as I don’t like alk to be more than 9.go slow by dosing bacteria and you will be ok with sps

 

[Battlecorals]

Hey there. sorry to hear about the troubles. I am confident we can figure something out here.

So, a great place to start the troubleshooting process, especially when it comes to SPS is your water. How you make it, and what your tolerances are for overall purity. Can you tell us a little bit about your ro/di set up? Sorry if I missed it already.

 

[njreefkeeper]

Interesting, I hadn't come across this nutrients / alkalinity correlation, any chance you could supply a link to a write up or thread discussion for our benefit, Thanks

Actually, being an old salt in this hobby, sometimes I take things for granted. Not to derail this thread but for those interested I hope this is an interesting read.

I’ll find links when I get home from work but many of us who were keeping reef tanks in the late 90’s and early 2000’s kept our alkalinty above 9dkh…many 10-12. We had terrible test kits available compared to what’s at our disposal today. Nitrate and phosphate were our enemies. Eliminate it at all cost. We didn’t even have gfo yet. Our tanks were lit like the sun with 8 hours (minimum) of 250 or 400 watt halides in large reflectors. It was bright. Very bright white tanks. The kind of white that people say bleaches corals today. SPS grew out of the water…and fast. Our equipment was nowhere near as efficient as it is today. Skimmers were huge downdrafts or Becketts. The bigger the better. The thing we didn’t realize at the time was that while these skimmers were building up enough organics to skim again, they were leaving many organics and particulate in the water column for corals to feed. We had no coral foods or amino acids. Today, skimmers are so efficient that a 30 watt skimmer pump and 20” skimmer body can outcompete any skimmer from 20 years ago that needed a large external power hungry iwaki pump and a 4 foot skimmer tower. All the available salt mixes had dkh matching the alkalinities we were running. But I digress.

Then came the Italian contingency with the introduction of the Blue Coral Method. They ran alkalinity in the (unheard of today) ranges of 10-12 and sometimes upwards of 14-15 dkh. A few times a week they fed Pappone (a homemade mixture of I believe 5 clams, 5oysters, 5 whole shrimp, some sugar and RO water blended and frozen). They’d break off a good chunk of this concoction and feed it to the tank a couple times a week just before or just after lights out. Oh, and they added human growth hormone LOL. So the topic of discussion came up of “aren’t they concerned about phosphate and nitrate?” The reply was “huh? What’s that?” Many would argue that the tanks of that time outcompeted anything we see today. This was right around the time t5 was gaining in popularity. Better uniform light and options in bulbs. Also making its debut was carbon dosing. Many were adding vodka, vinegar, sugar or a combination therof to feed the bacteria that lower nutrients. Those with high alkalinity saw their corals pale out, recede from the base, get burnt tips and die. Zeovit had just introduced their method of running a ULNS with all the fancy blue bottles. Among their explicit protocols was to not exceed an alkalinty of 8. Keep it low at all costs close to natural sea water. Alk of 7-7.5, calcium of 390-410 and magnesium in the 1200’s. Oh, and if you didn’t dose the amino acids and other bottles you’d watch your sticks slowly die of starvation. Midday photoperiods got shorter; many running their lights only 4 - 5 hours at midday instead of halides blazing 8-10 hours. You simply couldn’t give them that much light with so few nutrients available. So white light was the enemy. T5 fixtures started using one light max in an 8 bulb fixture with the rest loaded up on blue. Red Sea introduced their ULN method, instructed people to use their already available blue bucket salt and said “for coral farmers and those looking to grow out their frags faster, here’s Red Sea Coral Pro”. But they also told people to keep nitrates and phosphates in the water and not carbon dose.

Then LEDs hit the scene. And it didn’t go so well with the first (and even second) generations of laser beam focused fixtures. Corals under the fixture got torched and anything 4-5 inches away browned out. People were still keeping lower alkalinities and lower nutrients. Right around this time I started a thread on reef center called the “dirty SPS tank club” if anyone cares to Google it. I won’t link a competing forum here. So everyone said it must be that there’s too much par in LEDs and we should run the tanks with less white…and we need more fixtures because the spread is bad. People that started running their tanks with too much blue saw growth stagnate. Corals browned out. Confusion was the order of the day. Many went back to halides and t5.

Then Coral Lab introduced the AB+ schedule that mimicked a 4-1 t5 ATI blue plus to coral plus ratio. WWC tweaked it to run mostly blue the majority of the day with a 6 hour “white” period for health and growth of the corals at the beginning of the day; and they blanketed aquariums with enough fixtures to rival the cost of a nice used car. It became “vogue” to run nitrates and phosphates as long as the redfield ratio was adhered to. WWC also began trumpeting the “flow is more important than light” mantra. I’m in the camp that flow needs to match light, light, nutrients and elements.

The thing that boggles me is that we’re serendipitously almost back to where we were 20 years ago. People are now dosing nitrate and phosphate, running their tanks with mostly blue light (with a hint of white at midday) but still keeping their alkalinities lower because they fear burnt tips and assume they’ll get RTN and STN. Josh at WWC is on a BRS video stating that they keep their alkalinty around 8.6, nitrates around 20 and try to keep phosphate under .1 ppm.

Meanwhile, a well known reefer named Sanjay Joshi runs all his radions at 100% on every channel, 100% intensity (the majority of the day) has nitrates that have gone high enough to show red on an API test kit, phosphate of .4 (not .04), alkalinty he likes to run around 10 and has no algae in his tank with a whole lot of MP60’s, MP40’s and gyres to match the lighting intensity, nutrients and alkalinity. Mike Paletta is quoted as saying nobody grows corals as colorful and as fast as Sanjay.

If you’ve read this far….Is anyone seeing the correlations here?

So, my wife and I moved about a year ago. I turned our basement into my hobby room and addiction. I have a tank with Neptune Sky units over it and a tank with 250 watt radiums over it. I run a LOT of white light. Saturday is my testing day. My halide tank (62x32x24) runs 15-20 nitrates, .15 phosphate, calcium of 450, alkalinity right now is 13.1 dkh, magnesium is 1400 (ish). I have 3 purple tangs, 1 Red Sea sail fin tang, a powder blue tang 5 lyretail anthias, a leopard wrasses and a Falco hawk fish. Three MP40’s (and a 4th soon to be added) are running 100% in gyre mode and sleep to 50% at lights out. My reefbrite strips are on for 12 hours and my halides are on for 8. Par at the bottom of the tank is around 375. The top of the rocks are about 575-600 par. Many argue you can’t run that kind of par with LEDs. Uhm…yea you can. Match the alkalinty to the nutrients and flow. It’s not a mystical light source. My sky lights run 100% on every channel at 80% intensity for 8 hours a day. My parameters are about the same as they are in the halide tank. I posted the below picture of an ASD rainbow Mille I received from an online vendor who uses radions. I was very specific in asking what his lighting schedule was running before I put it into the tank. I received the coral on 9/7 (first pic) and the second pic is a couple days ago. It’s been sitting on the bottom of the tank acclimating to my light for more than 4 months. It did not bleach, RTN, or brown out. It’s gotten better, grown very well and colored up. Granted, this is a new tank at only a year, but I think from this full spectrum FTS picture it can be seen that nothing is bleaching, browning out and dying.

I feed a LOT. I always have. What’s a lot? A half a full sheet of nori a day, a large package of LRS lasts two weeks, NLS pellets and PE Flakes. This is daily.

So yes, it’s important to match the nutrients to the light intensity/duration, flow, and elements. This is the route I take and always have. Right now kalk is my source of supplementation at full evaporation rate until I need my calcium reactor to come online. For those chasing nutrients, it’s ok to dose nitrates and phosphates to get to where you want if you’re running low, but if you need to keep dosing them I feel it’s not as ideal as feeding to those levels. I believe feeding the fish and creating ammonia that converts to nitrate is much much more beneficial to the system than circumventing the ammonia conversion process that multiples bacteria.

so…that’s my .02

 

[spsick]

Light is not the problem here. This 4x t5 alone would be enough for a tank that size and the g5s are just gonna add some pop/punch.

The only thing that jumps out to me is that the corals seem pale even with higher nutrients. That tells me they are not taking up nutrients properly. And you have zero algae so something is weird o just can’t say what.

What are you feeding/dosing?

My only suggestion would be increase water changes until you get through this. Can help equalize any chemistry imbalances.

 

[Lavey29]

Actually, being an old salt in this hobby, sometimes I take things for granted. Not to derail this thread but for those interested I hope this is an interesting read.

I’ll find links when I get home from work but many of us who were keeping reef tanks in the late 90’s and early 2000’s kept our alkalinty above 9dkh…many 10-12. We had terrible test kits available compared to what’s at our disposal today. Nitrate and phosphate were our enemies. Eliminate it at all cost. We didn’t even have gfo yet. Our tanks were lit like the sun with 8 hours (minimum) of 250 or 400 watt halides in large reflectors. It was bright. Very bright white tanks. The kind of white that people say bleaches corals today. SPS grew out of the water…and fast. Our equipment was nowhere near as efficient as it is today. Skimmers were huge downdrafts or Becketts. The bigger the better. The thing we didn’t realize at the time was that while these skimmers were building up enough organics to skim again, they were leaving many organics and particulate in the water column for corals to feed. We had no coral foods or amino acids. Today, skimmers are so efficient that a 30 watt skimmer pump and 20” skimmer body can outcompete any skimmer from 20 years ago that needed a large external power hungry iwaki pump and a 4 foot skimmer tower. All the available salt mixes had dkh matching the alkalinities we were running. But I digress.

Then came the Italian contingency with the introduction of the Blue Coral Method. They ran alkalinity in the (unheard of today) ranges of 10-12 and sometimes upwards of 14-15 dkh. A few times a week they fed Pappone (a homemade mixture of I believe 5 clams, 5oysters, 5 whole shrimp, some sugar and RO water blended and frozen). They’d break off a good chunk of this concoction and feed it to the tank a couple times a week just before or just after lights out. Oh, and they added human growth hormone LOL. So the topic of discussion came up of “aren’t they concerned about phosphate and nitrate?” The reply was “huh? What’s that?” Many would argue that the tanks of that time outcompeted anything we see today. This was right around the time t5 was gaining in popularity. Better uniform light and options in bulbs. Also making its debut was carbon dosing. Many were adding vodka, vinegar, sugar or a combination therof to feed the bacteria that lower nutrients. Those with high alkalinity saw their corals pale out, recede from the base, get burnt tips and die. Zeovit had just introduced their method of running a ULNS with all the fancy blue bottles. Among their explicit protocols was to not exceed an alkalinty of 8. Keep it low at all costs close to natural sea water. Alk of 7-7.5, calcium of 390-410 and magnesium in the 1200’s. Oh, and if you didn’t dose the amino acids and other bottles you’d watch your sticks slowly die of starvation. Midday photoperiods got shorter; many running their lights only 4 - 5 hours at midday instead of halides blazing 8-10 hours. You simply couldn’t give them that much light with so few nutrients available. So white light was the enemy. T5 fixtures started using one light max in an 8 bulb fixture with the rest loaded up on blue. Red Sea introduced their ULN method, instructed people to use their already available blue bucket salt and said “for coral farmers and those looking to grow out their frags faster, here’s Red Sea Coral Pro”. But they also told people to keep nitrates and phosphates in the water and not carbon dose.

Then LEDs hit the scene. And it didn’t go so well with the first (and even second) generations of laser beam focused fixtures. Corals under the fixture got torched and anything 4-5 inches away browned out. People were still keeping lower alkalinities and lower nutrients. Right around this time I started a thread on reef center called the “dirty SPS tank club” if anyone cares to Google it. I won’t link a competing forum here. So everyone said it must be that there’s too much par in LEDs and we should run the tanks with less white…and we need more fixtures because the spread is bad. People that started running their tanks with too much blue saw growth stagnate. Corals browned out. Confusion was the order of the day. Many went back to halides and t5.

Then Coral Lab introduced the AB+ schedule that mimicked a 4-1 t5 ATI blue plus to coral plus ratio. WWC tweaked it to run mostly blue the majority of the day with a 6 hour “white” period for health and growth of the corals at the beginning of the day; and they blanketed aquariums with enough fixtures to rival the cost of a nice used car. It became “vogue” to run nitrates and phosphates as long as the redfield ratio was adhered to. WWC also began trumpeting the “flow is more important than light” mantra. I’m in the camp that flow needs to match light, light, nutrients and elements.

The thing that boggles me is that we’re serendipitously almost back to where we were 20 years ago. People are now dosing nitrate and phosphate, running their tanks with mostly blue light (with a hint of white at midday) but still keeping their alkalinities lower because they fear burnt tips and assume they’ll get RTN and STN. Josh at WWC is on a BRS video stating that they keep their alkalinty around 8.6, nitrates around 20 and try to keep phosphate under .1 ppm.

Meanwhile, a well known reefer named Sanjay Joshi runs all his radions at 100% on every channel, 100% intensity (the majority of the day) has nitrates that have gone high enough to show red on an API test kit, phosphate of .4 (not .04), alkalinty he likes to run around 10 and has no algae in his tank with a whole lot of MP60’s, MP40’s and gyres to match the lighting intensity, nutrients and alkalinity. Mike Paletta is quoted as saying nobody grows corals as colorful and as fast as Sanjay.

If you’ve read this far….Is anyone seeing the correlations here?

So, my wife and I moved about a year ago. I turned our basement into my hobby room and addiction. I have a tank with Neptune Sky units over it and a tank with 250 watt radiums over it. I run a LOT of white light. Saturday is my testing day. My halide tank (62x32x24) runs 15-20 nitrates, .15 phosphate, calcium of 450, alkalinity right now is 13.1 dkh, magnesium is 1400 (ish). I have 3 purple tangs, 1 Red Sea sail fin tang, a powder blue tang 5 lyretail anthias, a leopard wrasses and a Falco hawk fish. Three MP40’s (and a 4th soon to be added) are running 100% in gyre mode and sleep to 50% at lights out. My reefbrite strips are on for 12 hours and my halides are on for 8. Par at the bottom of the tank is around 375. The top of the rocks are about 575-600 par. Many argue you can’t run that kind of par with LEDs. Uhm…yea you can. Match the alkalinty to the nutrients and flow. It’s not a mystical light source. My sky lights run 100% on every channel at 80% intensity for 8 hours a day. My parameters are about the same as they are in the halide tank. I posted the below picture of an ASD rainbow Mille I received from an online vendor who uses radions. I was very specific in asking what his lighting schedule was running before I put it into the tank. I received the coral on 9/7 (first pic) and the second pic is a couple days ago. It’s been sitting on the bottom of the tank acclimating to my light for more than 4 months. It did not bleach, RTN, or brown out. It’s gotten better, grown very well and colored up. Granted, this is a new tank at only a year, but I think from this full spectrum FTS picture it can be seen that nothing is bleaching, browning out and dying.

I feed a LOT. I always have. What’s a lot? A half a full sheet of nori a day, a large package of LRS lasts two weeks, NLS pellets and PE Flakes. This is daily.

So yes, it’s important to match the nutrients to the light intensity/duration, flow, and elements. This is the route I take and always have. Right now kalk is my source of supplementation at full evaporation rate until I need my calcium reactor to come online. For those chasing nutrients, it’s ok to dose nitrates and phosphates to get to where you want if you’re running low, but if you need to keep dosing them I feel it’s not as ideal as feeding to those levels. I believe feeding the fish and creating ammonia that converts to nitrate is much much more beneficial to the system than circumventing the ammonia conversion process that multiples bacteria.

so…that’s my .02

Excellent historical read on the evolution of reefing methods.

 

[njreefkeeper]

Thank you. Additionally, I hope Abe @Coral Euphoria will chime in. Love his videos and wanted to reiterate something he’s said. If you can get to the point where you’re feeding heavy and still have close to undetectable levels…you’re still good to go. To me, that’s reefkeeping nirvana and you’ve attained the holy grail of balance. But I want to stress that most people only THINK they’re feeding a lot. I’ve had so many people tell me they’re feeding a lot and their fish are showing their spines. Then they’ve come over and seen my feedings and said “oh my”…to which I tell them that’s one of at least 4 feedings a day.

Case in point…we all know people in the hobby who only keep fish. They have no interest in coral. I had a friend whose skimmer barely worked on a 155 bowfront. The fish stock list was ungodly. If I recall, some of the fish were a moorish idol, blue face Angel, emperor Angel, purple tang, barienne tang, kole tang, many butterflies, Anthias, a maroon clown and too many azure damsels to count. He liked light too. He had a 10 bulb constellation fixture. Nitrates? Hell yeah. Phosphate? The Hanna would blink because the reading was so high. His fish are still the fattest I’ve ever seen. But what struck me as odd was there was no algae anywhere in the tank. He didn’t even have a cleanup crew. He wanted to get into keeping a few corals. I told him SPS were his only option with all those angels and butterflies but his nutrients concerned me. I gave him a 4” piece of green slimer, birdsnest and a piece of ORA red planet. Didn’t chat or see him for almost a year. He asked if I had any corals to sell him. I said did the others die? He said yell no…the green slimer doubled in size, the Red Planet is bright red with green base and tabling but the birdsnest succumbed to what he thought might have been too much light. Crazy thing is, he never dosed alkalinty, calcium or magnesium. The only reason he had a lot of flow was to keep all those fish fighting currents instead of fighting. I was beside myself.

My point: running my tanks like well lit, well fed fish tanks has always produced better results for me. Over, and over, and over. Any time my nutrients got low, hair algae would start growing and the corals would decline. The same nutrients that feed algae feed our corals. I’ve found that hair algae is much better at living in low nutrient environments than corals are. Once hair algae takes hold, corals pale out (even if your phosphate is measuring low enough to be “perfect reef parameters”. You’ve basically created an imbalance of making it more hospitable for algae than coral; turning the tank into an algae scrubber that’s stripping it of nutrients and trace elements. It’s not that algae kills corals directly. It just outcompetes corals for food and trace elements. That’s why people who run algae scrubbers too aggressively start to see pale corals and think it’s the lighting. Just because the algae isn’t in the tank doesn’t mean it’s not doing the same darn thing in the scrubber.

My .02

 

[branbray07]

what did you use before AF and why did you switch over?

Red Sea Blue bucket. Had similar issues as well, along with Dinos etc. However tank was younger. I switched to @Aquaforest because i have had really good results in the past with them. My previous tank a similar cube was thriving with AF, and i love their products.

PO4/NO3 high compared to alk..when alk is 7-8 PO4 should be 0.01-0.04 and NO3 1-5ppm..when alk is 9-10 your PO4 and NO3 will do ok..I faced similar issue years ago and fixed it with dosing bacteria by reducing PO4/NO3 as I don’t like alk to be more than 9.go slow by dosing bacteria and you will be ok with sps

i actually raised nutrients very slowly because tank looked the same, and they were that low. Nothing seemed to improve. That , and a few Dinos outbreaks about 4 months agoo.. never run that low again lol.

Light is not the problem here. This 4x t5 alone would be enough for a tank that size and the g5s are just gonna add some pop/punch.

The only thing that jumps out to me is that the corals seem pale even with higher nutrients. That tells me they are not taking up nutrients properly. And you have zero algae so something is weird o just can’t say what.

What are you feeding/dosing?

My only suggestion would be increase water changes until you get through this. Can help equalize any chemistry imbalances.

Exactly . They always do the same. They start paling out, then necrosis takes over with burn tips. As far al algae, i have to scrape glass daily or at least every other day since it will be completely covered. I dont feed corals anymore, i only feed fish. Rods 2 times a day. I have plenty of big poopers. 2 tangs and a mystery wrasse, 2 clowns, 4 chromis, 2 firefish. I only dose KALK nightly 20ml while light out. so 1 ML every hr for 15 hrs.

 

[branbray07]

wow

Actually, being an old salt in this hobby, sometimes I take things for granted. Not to derail this thread but for those interested I hope this is an interesting read.

I’ll find links when I get home from work but many of us who were keeping reef tanks in the late 90’s and early 2000’s kept our alkalinty above 9dkh…many 10-12. We had terrible test kits available compared to what’s at our disposal today. Nitrate and phosphate were our enemies. Eliminate it at all cost. We didn’t even have gfo yet. Our tanks were lit like the sun with 8 hours (minimum) of 250 or 400 watt halides in large reflectors. It was bright. Very bright white tanks. The kind of white that people say bleaches corals today. SPS grew out of the water…and fast. Our equipment was nowhere near as efficient as it is today. Skimmers were huge downdrafts or Becketts. The bigger the better. The thing we didn’t realize at the time was that while these skimmers were building up enough organics to skim again, they were leaving many organics and particulate in the water column for corals to feed. We had no coral foods or amino acids. Today, skimmers are so efficient that a 30 watt skimmer pump and 20” skimmer body can outcompete any skimmer from 20 years ago that needed a large external power hungry iwaki pump and a 4 foot skimmer tower. All the available salt mixes had dkh matching the alkalinities we were running. But I digress.

Then came the Italian contingency with the introduction of the Blue Coral Method. They ran alkalinity in the (unheard of today) ranges of 10-12 and sometimes upwards of 14-15 dkh. A few times a week they fed Pappone (a homemade mixture of I believe 5 clams, 5oysters, 5 whole shrimp, some sugar and RO water blended and frozen). They’d break off a good chunk of this concoction and feed it to the tank a couple times a week just before or just after lights out. Oh, and they added human growth hormone LOL. So the topic of discussion came up of “aren’t they concerned about phosphate and nitrate?” The reply was “huh? What’s that?” Many would argue that the tanks of that time outcompeted anything we see today. This was right around the time t5 was gaining in popularity. Better uniform light and options in bulbs. Also making its debut was carbon dosing. Many were adding vodka, vinegar, sugar or a combination therof to feed the bacteria that lower nutrients. Those with high alkalinity saw their corals pale out, recede from the base, get burnt tips and die. Zeovit had just introduced their method of running a ULNS with all the fancy blue bottles. Among their explicit protocols was to not exceed an alkalinty of 8. Keep it low at all costs close to natural sea water. Alk of 7-7.5, calcium of 390-410 and magnesium in the 1200’s. Oh, and if you didn’t dose the amino acids and other bottles you’d watch your sticks slowly die of starvation. Midday photoperiods got shorter; many running their lights only 4 - 5 hours at midday instead of halides blazing 8-10 hours. You simply couldn’t give them that much light with so few nutrients available. So white light was the enemy. T5 fixtures started using one light max in an 8 bulb fixture with the rest loaded up on blue. Red Sea introduced their ULN method, instructed people to use their already available blue bucket salt and said “for coral farmers and those looking to grow out their frags faster, here’s Red Sea Coral Pro”. But they also told people to keep nitrates and phosphates in the water and not carbon dose.

Then LEDs hit the scene. And it didn’t go so well with the first (and even second) generations of laser beam focused fixtures. Corals under the fixture got torched and anything 4-5 inches away browned out. People were still keeping lower alkalinities and lower nutrients. Right around this time I started a thread on reef center called the “dirty SPS tank club” if anyone cares to Google it. I won’t link a competing forum here. So everyone said it must be that there’s too much par in LEDs and we should run the tanks with less white…and we need more fixtures because the spread is bad. People that started running their tanks with too much blue saw growth stagnate. Corals browned out. Confusion was the order of the day. Many went back to halides and t5.

Then Coral Lab introduced the AB+ schedule that mimicked a 4-1 t5 ATI blue plus to coral plus ratio. WWC tweaked it to run mostly blue the majority of the day with a 6 hour “white” period for health and growth of the corals at the beginning of the day; and they blanketed aquariums with enough fixtures to rival the cost of a nice used car. It became “vogue” to run nitrates and phosphates as long as the redfield ratio was adhered to. WWC also began trumpeting the “flow is more important than light” mantra. I’m in the camp that flow needs to match light, light, nutrients and elements.

The thing that boggles me is that we’re serendipitously almost back to where we were 20 years ago. People are now dosing nitrate and phosphate, running their tanks with mostly blue light (with a hint of white at midday) but still keeping their alkalinities lower because they fear burnt tips and assume they’ll get RTN and STN. Josh at WWC is on a BRS video stating that they keep their alkalinty around 8.6, nitrates around 20 and try to keep phosphate under .1 ppm.

Meanwhile, a well known reefer named Sanjay Joshi runs all his radions at 100% on every channel, 100% intensity (the majority of the day) has nitrates that have gone high enough to show red on an API test kit, phosphate of .4 (not .04), alkalinty he likes to run around 10 and has no algae in his tank with a whole lot of MP60’s, MP40’s and gyres to match the lighting intensity, nutrients and alkalinity. Mike Paletta is quoted as saying nobody grows corals as colorful and as fast as Sanjay.

If you’ve read this far….Is anyone seeing the correlations here?

So, my wife and I moved about a year ago. I turned our basement into my hobby room and addiction. I have a tank with Neptune Sky units over it and a tank with 250 watt radiums over it. I run a LOT of white light. Saturday is my testing day. My halide tank (62x32x24) runs 15-20 nitrates, .15 phosphate, calcium of 450, alkalinity right now is 13.1 dkh, magnesium is 1400 (ish). I have 3 purple tangs, 1 Red Sea sail fin tang, a powder blue tang 5 lyretail anthias, a leopard wrasses and a Falco hawk fish. Three MP40’s (and a 4th soon to be added) are running 100% in gyre mode and sleep to 50% at lights out. My reefbrite strips are on for 12 hours and my halides are on for 8. Par at the bottom of the tank is around 375. The top of the rocks are about 575-600 par. Many argue you can’t run that kind of par with LEDs. Uhm…yea you can. Match the alkalinty to the nutrients and flow. It’s not a mystical light source. My sky lights run 100% on every channel at 80% intensity for 8 hours a day. My parameters are about the same as they are in the halide tank. I posted the below picture of an ASD rainbow Mille I received from an online vendor who uses radions. I was very specific in asking what his lighting schedule was running before I put it into the tank. I received the coral on 9/7 (first pic) and the second pic is a couple days ago. It’s been sitting on the bottom of the tank acclimating to my light for more than 4 months. It did not bleach, RTN, or brown out. It’s gotten better, grown very well and colored up. Granted, this is a new tank at only a year, but I think from this full spectrum FTS picture it can be seen that nothing is bleaching, browning out and dying.

I feed a LOT. I always have. What’s a lot? A half a full sheet of nori a day, a large package of LRS lasts two weeks, NLS pellets and PE Flakes. This is daily.

So yes, it’s important to match the nutrients to the light intensity/duration, flow, and elements. This is the route I take and always have. Right now kalk is my source of supplementation at full evaporation rate until I need my calcium reactor to come online. For those chasing nutrients, it’s ok to dose nitrates and phosphates to get to where you want if you’re running low, but if you need to keep dosing them I feel it’s not as ideal as feeding to those levels. I believe feeding the fish and creating ammonia that converts to nitrate is much much more beneficial to the system than circumventing the ammonia conversion process that multiples bacteria.

so…that’s my .02

what an amazing article / read. Thanks you soo much for this btw. Nothing like old school reefers.

 

[Coral Euphoria]

Actually, being an old salt in this hobby, sometimes I take things for granted. Not to derail this thread but for those interested I hope this is an interesting read.

I’ll find links when I get home from work but many of us who were keeping reef tanks in the late 90’s and early 2000’s kept our alkalinty above 9dkh…many 10-12. We had terrible test kits available compared to what’s at our disposal today. Nitrate and phosphate were our enemies. Eliminate it at all cost. We didn’t even have gfo yet. Our tanks were lit like the sun with 8 hours (minimum) of 250 or 400 watt halides in large reflectors. It was bright. Very bright white tanks. The kind of white that people say bleaches corals today. SPS grew out of the water…and fast. Our equipment was nowhere near as efficient as it is today. Skimmers were huge downdrafts or Becketts. The bigger the better. The thing we didn’t realize at the time was that while these skimmers were building up enough organics to skim again, they were leaving many organics and particulate in the water column for corals to feed. We had no coral foods or amino acids. Today, skimmers are so efficient that a 30 watt skimmer pump and 20” skimmer body can outcompete any skimmer from 20 years ago that needed a large external power hungry iwaki pump and a 4 foot skimmer tower. All the available salt mixes had dkh matching the alkalinities we were running. But I digress.

Then came the Italian contingency with the introduction of the Blue Coral Method. They ran alkalinity in the (unheard of today) ranges of 10-12 and sometimes upwards of 14-15 dkh. A few times a week they fed Pappone (a homemade mixture of I believe 5 clams, 5oysters, 5 whole shrimp, some sugar and RO water blended and frozen). They’d break off a good chunk of this concoction and feed it to the tank a couple times a week just before or just after lights out. Oh, and they added human growth hormone LOL. So the topic of discussion came up of “aren’t they concerned about phosphate and nitrate?” The reply was “huh? What’s that?” Many would argue that the tanks of that time outcompeted anything we see today. This was right around the time t5 was gaining in popularity. Better uniform light and options in bulbs. Also making its debut was carbon dosing. Many were adding vodka, vinegar, sugar or a combination therof to feed the bacteria that lower nutrients. Those with high alkalinity saw their corals pale out, recede from the base, get burnt tips and die. Zeovit had just introduced their method of running a ULNS with all the fancy blue bottles. Among their explicit protocols was to not exceed an alkalinty of 8. Keep it low at all costs close to natural sea water. Alk of 7-7.5, calcium of 390-410 and magnesium in the 1200’s. Oh, and if you didn’t dose the amino acids and other bottles you’d watch your sticks slowly die of starvation. Midday photoperiods got shorter; many running their lights only 4 - 5 hours at midday instead of halides blazing 8-10 hours. You simply couldn’t give them that much light with so few nutrients available. So white light was the enemy. T5 fixtures started using one light max in an 8 bulb fixture with the rest loaded up on blue. Red Sea introduced their ULN method, instructed people to use their already available blue bucket salt and said “for coral farmers and those looking to grow out their frags faster, here’s Red Sea Coral Pro”. But they also told people to keep nitrates and phosphates in the water and not carbon dose.

Then LEDs hit the scene. And it didn’t go so well with the first (and even second) generations of laser beam focused fixtures. Corals under the fixture got torched and anything 4-5 inches away browned out. People were still keeping lower alkalinities and lower nutrients. Right around this time I started a thread on reef center called the “dirty SPS tank club” if anyone cares to Google it. I won’t link a competing forum here. So everyone said it must be that there’s too much par in LEDs and we should run the tanks with less white…and we need more fixtures because the spread is bad. People that started running their tanks with too much blue saw growth stagnate. Corals browned out. Confusion was the order of the day. Many went back to halides and t5.

Then Coral Lab introduced the AB+ schedule that mimicked a 4-1 t5 ATI blue plus to coral plus ratio. WWC tweaked it to run mostly blue the majority of the day with a 6 hour “white” period for health and growth of the corals at the beginning of the day; and they blanketed aquariums with enough fixtures to rival the cost of a nice used car. It became “vogue” to run nitrates and phosphates as long as the redfield ratio was adhered to. WWC also began trumpeting the “flow is more important than light” mantra. I’m in the camp that flow needs to match light, light, nutrients and elements.

The thing that boggles me is that we’re serendipitously almost back to where we were 20 years ago. People are now dosing nitrate and phosphate, running their tanks with mostly blue light (with a hint of white at midday) but still keeping their alkalinities lower because they fear burnt tips and assume they’ll get RTN and STN. Josh at WWC is on a BRS video stating that they keep their alkalinty around 8.6, nitrates around 20 and try to keep phosphate under .1 ppm.

Meanwhile, a well known reefer named Sanjay Joshi runs all his radions at 100% on every channel, 100% intensity (the majority of the day) has nitrates that have gone high enough to show red on an API test kit, phosphate of .4 (not .04), alkalinty he likes to run around 10 and has no algae in his tank with a whole lot of MP60’s, MP40’s and gyres to match the lighting intensity, nutrients and alkalinity. Mike Paletta is quoted as saying nobody grows corals as colorful and as fast as Sanjay.

If you’ve read this far….Is anyone seeing the correlations here?

So, my wife and I moved about a year ago. I turned our basement into my hobby room and addiction. I have a tank with Neptune Sky units over it and a tank with 250 watt radiums over it. I run a LOT of white light. Saturday is my testing day. My halide tank (62x32x24) runs 15-20 nitrates, .15 phosphate, calcium of 450, alkalinity right now is 13.1 dkh, magnesium is 1400 (ish). I have 3 purple tangs, 1 Red Sea sail fin tang, a powder blue tang 5 lyretail anthias, a leopard wrasses and a Falco hawk fish. Three MP40’s (and a 4th soon to be added) are running 100% in gyre mode and sleep to 50% at lights out. My reefbrite strips are on for 12 hours and my halides are on for 8. Par at the bottom of the tank is around 375. The top of the rocks are about 575-600 par. Many argue you can’t run that kind of par with LEDs. Uhm…yea you can. Match the alkalinty to the nutrients and flow. It’s not a mystical light source. My sky lights run 100% on every channel at 80% intensity for 8 hours a day. My parameters are about the same as they are in the halide tank. I posted the below picture of an ASD rainbow Mille I received from an online vendor who uses radions. I was very specific in asking what his lighting schedule was running before I put it into the tank. I received the coral on 9/7 (first pic) and the second pic is a couple days ago. It’s been sitting on the bottom of the tank acclimating to my light for more than 4 months. It did not bleach, RTN, or brown out. It’s gotten better, grown very well and colored up. Granted, this is a new tank at only a year, but I think from this full spectrum FTS picture it can be seen that nothing is bleaching, browning out and dying.

I feed a LOT. I always have. What’s a lot? A half a full sheet of nori a day, a large package of LRS lasts two weeks, NLS pellets and PE Flakes. This is daily.

So yes, it’s important to match the nutrients to the light intensity/duration, flow, and elements. This is the route I take and always have. Right now kalk is my source of supplementation at full evaporation rate until I need my calcium reactor to come online. For those chasing nutrients, it’s ok to dose nitrates and phosphates to get to where you want if you’re running low, but if you need to keep dosing them I feel it’s not as ideal as feeding to those levels. I believe feeding the fish and creating ammonia that converts to nitrate is much much more beneficial to the system than circumventing the ammonia conversion process that multiples bacteria.

so…that’s my .02

This is an excellent write-up. I was planning to do a video on nutrients with a similar approach to looking at the history. It bothers me when people nowadays say, "we were wrong about nutrients" back then. I agree that skimmers in the early 2000s were horribly inefficient, but at the time when we were running low nutrients (late 2000s), people say our skimmers were still crap and our test kits were bad. They weren't; and I would like to put my 12yo bubble king mini 180 against any skimmer today. We also had accurate electronic phosphate testers. Anyway, reefers nowadays need more historical context when it comes to nutrients is why I'm pondering making this video. It will be a little different as it will factor in reefer psychology during the last two decades. You have went in way more detail than I am going to (if I make the video), but the premise is similar. There a few things you mentioned that I had not yet considered. Thanks for your two cents. Fantastic read!

OP sorry for highjacking the thread. Please continue with the problem at hand..

 

[branbray07]

Hey there. sorry to hear about the troubles. I am confident we can figure something out here.

So, a great place to start the troubleshooting process, especially when it comes to SPS is your water. How you make it, and what your tolerances are for overall purity. Can you tell us a little bit about your ro/di set up? Sorry if I missed it already.

WOW NOW IM HONORED..
Adam from BC. wow. No coral seller i respect more than you brother btw. Nothing but Elite.

Ok
So i make my water in a 20 brute container and now a MJ1200. I was using a chinese pump and noticed 2 weeks ago the screws were a bit rusted so i toss it. Could this have an impact? I dont know maybe, but i wont risk it. It usually let salt mix for about 4hrs before adding it. RO comes from LFS, i have done ICP and nothing shows on it other than

Silicon 35.84 µg/l

I mix at 1.025.

 

[njreefkeeper]

wow

what an amazing article / read. Thanks you soo much for this btw. Nothing like old school reefers.

I’ll post articles later. These are just my 20+ years of reefing and personal rants.

 

[odariel]

Thank you. Additionally, I hope Abe @Coral Euphoria will chime in. Love his videos and wanted to reiterate something he’s said. If you can get to the point where you’re feeding heavy and still have close to undetectable levels…you’re still good to go. To me, that’s reefkeeping nirvana and you’ve attained the holy grail of balance. But I want to stress that most people only THINK they’re feeding a lot. I’ve had so many people tell me they’re feeding a lot and their fish are showing their spines. Then they’ve come over and seen my feedings and said “oh my”…to which I tell them that’s one of at least 4 feedings a day.

Case in point…we all know people in the hobby who only keep fish. They have no interest in coral. I had a friend whose skimmer barely worked on a 155 bowfront. The fish stock list was ungodly. If I recall, some of the fish were a moorish idol, blue face Angel, emperor Angel, purple tang, barienne tang, kole tang, many butterflies, Anthias, a maroon clown and too many azure damsels to count. He liked light too. He had a 10 bulb constellation fixture. Nitrates? Hell yeah. Phosphate? The Hanna would blink because the reading was so high. His fish are still the fattest I’ve ever seen. But what struck me as odd was there was no algae anywhere in the tank. He didn’t even have a cleanup crew. He wanted to get into keeping a few corals. I told him SPS were his only option with all those angels and butterflies but his nutrients concerned me. I gave him a 4” piece of green slimer, birdsnest and a piece of ORA red planet. Didn’t chat or see him for almost a year. He asked if I had any corals to sell him. I said did the others die? He said yell no…the green slimer doubled in size, the Red Planet is bright red with green base and tabling but the birdsnest succumbed to what he thought might have been too much light. Crazy thing is, he never dosed alkalinty, calcium or magnesium. The only reason he had a lot of flow was to keep all those fish fighting currents instead of fighting. I was beside myself.

My point: running my tanks like well lit, well fed fish tanks has always produced better results for me. Over, and over, and over. Any time my nutrients got low, hair algae would start growing and the corals would decline. The same nutrients that feed algae feed our corals. I’ve found that hair algae is much better at living in low nutrient environments than corals are. Once hair algae takes hold, corals pale out (even if your phosphate is measuring low enough to be “perfect reef parameters”. You’ve basically created an imbalance of making it more hospitable for algae than coral; turning the tank into an algae scrubber that’s stripping it of nutrients and trace elements. It’s not that algae kills corals directly. It just outcompetes corals for food and trace elements. That’s why people who run algae scrubbers too aggressively start to see pale corals and think it’s the lighting. Just because the algae isn’t in the tank doesn’t mean it’s not doing the same darn thing in the scrubber.

My .02

i guess every step of a tank's chapter has different needs.. for me at least, an algae reactor with chaeto helped me have the tank as stocked as i wanted and control nutrients in a natural way at the beginning, when i didn't have a lot of coral. Now that my tank is full of it, that algae reactor is not needed, as the corals consume all the "waste" that my fishes produce.. and of course my feedings had to increase along with the tank's stock to keep up with my coral nutrient demands. one thing that is clear is that "many paths lead to rome" and there are several different ways to achieve a beautiful tank full of sps, but i agree, heavy in/heavy out with the nutrients works for me too.. but this only worked for me once i had a considerable ammount of coral that would take advantage of it.

@Coral Euphoria love ur content (and your amazing acros), some of the best on the net. Shame i live in spain and i can't buy from you!

 

[branbray07]

This is an excellent write-up. I was planning to do a video on nutrients with a similar approach to looking at the history. It bothers me when people nowadays say, "we were wrong about nutrients" back then. I agree that skimmers in the early 2000s were horribly inefficient, but at the time when we were running low nutrients (late 2000s), people say our skimmers were still crap and our test kits were bad. They weren't; and I would like to put my 12yo bubble king mini 180 against any skimmer today. We also had accurate electronic phosphate testers. Anyway, reefers nowadays need more historical context when it comes to nutrients is why I'm pondering making this video. It will be a little different as it will factor in reefer psychology during the last two decades. You have went in way more detail than I am going to (if I make the video), but the premise is similar. There a few things you mentioned that I had not yet considered. Thanks for your two cents. Fantastic read!

OP sorry for highjacking the thread. Please continue with the problem at hand..

NO WAY MAN. NO NEED FOR SORRY AT ALL!!!
Like i said and will always say. I love the old school reefers. The more knowledge the better regardless of the topic at hand. THank you for the amazing info.

Jorge.

 

[spsick]

Yes, the rusted screws on your mixing pump are def a cause for concern and probably why you had the high zinc reading. Further emphasizing my recommendation to ramp up water changes for a bit.

We got Abe and Adam here we’ll solve this mystery and then take over the world!!

 

[njreefkeeper]

This is an excellent write-up. I was planning to do a video on nutrients with a similar approach to looking at the history. It bothers me when people nowadays say, "we were wrong about nutrients" back then. I agree that skimmers in the early 2000s were horribly inefficient, but at the time when we were running low nutrients (late 2000s), people say our skimmers were still crap and our test kits were bad. They weren't; and I would like to put my 12yo bubble king mini 180 against any skimmer today. We also had accurate electronic phosphate testers. Anyway, reefers nowadays need more historical context when it comes to nutrients is why I'm pondering making this video. It will be a little different as it will factor in reefer psychology during the last two decades. You have went in way more detail than I am going to (if I make the video), but the premise is similar. There a few things you mentioned that I had not yet considered. Thanks for your two cents. Fantastic read!

OP sorry for highjacking the thread. Please continue with the problem at hand..

Thanks for the props Abe. I LOVE how you go into detail about your philosophies and methods.

To anyone still reading, I’m a long time student of this hobby. Many of us vets simply don’t post much because often times the forum boards have mostly new hobbyists following new trends and methodologies and it’s best many times to simply peruse than get involved.

The same &$@“ that worked 20 years ago still works today. Trust me. I’ve owned a retail store, have a maintenance company, worked at a public aquarium in husbandry and retreat to my basement to enjoy my tanks as much as possible. I still love it as much as I did when I started.

That said, Abe is a wealth of information and knowledge. Many see his tanks with a refugium, GFO, a good skimmer and “low nutrients” and think…”yeah, that’s the ticket. It’s time to up the filtration with a refugium, gfo, carbon and not feed my fish so much.” Good luck with that. It ain’t working. Go watch his videos. Look at Abe’s fish! They’re FAT, FAT, FAT. He’s running that filtration so that he CAN feed heavy and have colorful sticks. His system is PROCESSING those nutrients; not being deprived of them.

Many times people start seeing hair algae grow and corals start getting pale, brown, receding or a combination thereof. So then they post and everyone starts chiming in with (you need to run gfo to get those phosphates down, don’t feed so much, how old are your bulbs, etc etc.) I’ll tell you right now…bye bye corals. I’m sure many of you have witnessed this if you follow that path. When that happens I know this: phosphate is out of balance and I’m probably bottoming out on nitrate. I go the opposite direction. I start dosing nitrate and feeding more. And…..the algae eventually recedes as my nutrients fall back in line with the Redfield ratio. Corals start coloring back up and the balance is tipped in favor of coral keeping rather than algae remediation.

This isn’t something I’ve done once. It’s not coincidence. If it was then it’s a predictable coincidence that’s been repeatable for me. Anyone ever seen a wild reef that’s dead? It’s full of algae and the fish are gone. No organics feeding corals but there’s that algae…waving in the current. Meanwhile, the reefs that are thriving are teeming with fish. That’s where the food is. That’s where the corals thrive. Thats where nuisance algae takes a back seat.

It’s actually hard to brown out/bleach corals if you have strong lighting and heavy feeding.

End rant. Happy New Year everyone.

 

[saltyfins]

smooth skin corals will come back, that's the good thing there. You are lacking trace elements..that's what I see. but then I dose cobalt etc...in my tank, due to moonshiners

 

[njreefkeeper]

i guess every step of a tank's chapter has different needs.. for me at least, an algae reactor with chaeto helped me have the tank as stocked as i wanted and control nutrients in a natural way at the beginning, when i didn't have a lot of coral. Now that my tank is full of it, that algae reactor is not needed, as the corals consume all the "waste" that my fishes produce.. and of course my feedings had to increase along with the tank's stock to keep up with my coral nutrient demands. one thing that is clear is that "many paths lead to rome" and there are several different ways to achieve a beautiful tank full of sps, but i agree, heavy in/heavy out with the nutrients works for me too.. but this only worked for me once i had a considerable ammount of coral that would take advantage of it.

@Coral Euphoria love ur content (and your amazing acros), some of the best on the net. Shame i live in spain and i can't buy from you!

Oh I’m not disputing that at all. As the tank matures the need to tune down skimmers, lower the time a refugium or algae scrubber is on and maybe skip a water change now and then is almost guaranteed. For a while I’m sure many are feeding the same as when the filtration was pulling the load that the corals now do when they reach that point; only to find they can’t feed enough anymore and then start using aminos and coral foods.

Absolutely, there are many ways to Rome. Eventually the skimmer/refugium/ATS may even need to be taken offline or cut off a portion of the day as well. That’s what’s so great about watching a tank mature. That evolution as it gets better and better and more self sustaining is the ultimate reward in the hobby.

 

[Lavey29]

Thanks for the props Abe. I LOVE how you go into detail about your philosophies and methods.

To anyone still reading, I’m a long time student of this hobby. Many of us vets simply don’t post much because often times the forum boards have mostly new hobbyists following new trends and methodologies and it’s best many times to simply peruse than get involved.

The same &$@“ that worked 20 years ago still works today. Trust me. I’ve owned a retail store, have a maintenance company, worked at a public aquarium in husbandry and retreat to my basement to enjoy my tanks as much as possible. I still love it as much as I did when I started.

That said, Abe is a wealth of information and knowledge. Many see his tanks with a refugium, GFO, a good skimmer and “low nutrients” and think…”yeah, that’s the ticket. It’s time to up the filtration with a refugium, gfo, carbon and not feed my fish so much.” Good luck with that. It ain’t working. Go watch his videos. Look at Abe’s fish! They’re FAT, FAT, FAT. He’s running that filtration so that he CAN feed heavy and have colorful sticks. His system is PROCESSING those nutrients; not being deprived of them.

Many times people start seeing hair algae grow and corals start getting pale, brown, receding or a combination thereof. So then they post and everyone starts chiming in with (you need to run gfo to get those phosphates down, don’t feed so much, how old are your bulbs, etc etc.) I’ll tell you right now…bye bye corals. I’m sure many of you have witnessed this if you follow that path. When that happens I know this: phosphate is out of balance and I’m probably bottoming out on nitrate. I go the opposite direction. I start dosing nitrate and feeding more. And…..the algae eventually recedes as my nutrients fall back in line with the Redfield ratio. Corals start coloring back up and the balance is tipped in favor of coral keeping rather than algae remediation.

This isn’t something I’ve done once. It’s not coincidence. If it was then it’s a predictable coincidence that’s been repeatable for me. Anyone ever seen a wild reef that’s dead? It’s full of algae and the fish are gone. No organics feeding corals but there’s that algae…waving in the current. Meanwhile, the reefs that are thriving are teeming with fish. That’s where the food is. That’s where the corals thrive. Thats where nuisance algae takes a back seat.

It’s actually hard to brown out/bleach corals if you have strong lighting and heavy feeding.

End rant. Happy New Year everyone.

Do you supplement also with coral additives like aminos or just let the fish fertilizer handle everything?

 

[njreefkeeper]

Do you supplement also with coral additives like aminos or just let the fish fertilizer handle everything?

For now it’s a whole lot of fish poop. That’s why I started with a lot of fish and went with my “treat it as a fish tank first philosophy.” I do have an ATS on the tank. It was stripping faster than I liked so I dialed it back to 5 hours a day. An ICP showed I was getting low on trace elements (which the scrubber removes en masse) so I dosed Brightwell Restore. Once my levels were back to normal and the ATS was tuned down, I stopped dosing the trace elements and stuck with water changes; unless ofcourse I start to see the issues again.

I treat additives in bottles as tools to be used when I need to fix. I never rely on them for daily doses. In the end, I know a large water change is more in balance than playing mad scientist with elements that are already scarce in seawater to begin with. I don’t see myself needing to use an amino acid supplement (if at all) for a few years as the tank grows in and I can’t feed the fish enough anymore compared to the coral load. But, before that happens I’ll always tune down the skimmer, remove the ATS or even take the skimmer offline half the day before I resort to bottles.