Okay so I quietened down after things got heated. I didn’t want to offend anyone that had so kindly come to my rescue but I did keep reading. I’ve made up 100 litres of new seawater. That’s all the capacity I have to store it. Waiting for those to dissolve and heat up to test the salinity was HOURS. It’s cold here in the uk and I had to wait for each 25litre barrel to heat up, to test. One by one. All my spare heaters are very small as they were used in a 50litre tank.
I tested about 3 times a day. Ammonia stayed at 0 for 24 hours. Nitrates 1. Alk keeps dropping down to 6ish (I suck and making all the drops the same size). Magnesium was at 1400 but i stopped testing for it because my focus is making sure it’s safe right now not optimal, just safe. I realised I can’t take on all these problems at once, because I think I shocked my system trying to do this before.
salinity 0.25.
i started to notice in this time that my frogspawn had started to make a recovery, despite the clowns deciding to host it while it was dying. 2 of my mushrooms had also started to recover, along with my leathers. So I decided not to go with the full change as things were clearly improving and I didn’t want to shock them again. I wasn’t confident in my skills to do something like that effectively and I didn’t want to harm the fish. The fish are fine and they are my priority over corals to be honest. I have some sensitive species in there like a orange spot file fish and a mandarin who I’ve trained onto flake, pellet and frozen I really didn’t want to go back to square one with them. Especially the file fish, he was a pain in the butt to get to eat. When I first bought itit went on hunger strike for over a week.
My tank was ugly with bryopsis but everything was still healthy so I don’t even care about the bryopsis coming back right now, that’s something I will tackle naturally with macros or naturally in the future when the tank has stabilised. Any suggestions on ways to deal with this without chemicals would be greatly appreciated.
I am running carbon because those chemicals need out. Micronutrients is a risk I’m willing to take because I think chemicals are probably worse at this point. We can replace micronutrients but the chemicals are in there and they need to go.
I did a gentle 10% water change this morning. I agree this could have been more but I’m trying to avoid any shock here. I did this because the ammonia had creeped up to 0.8. I fed the fish last night so I’m assuming that’s why. Retested and it’s at 0.4 after the change. Not great, will probably do another in a few hours. Nitrate we’re at 2 before the change.
What I think has happened, again any input on this would be great, is I’ve killed my filter bacteria. Ammonia is high nitrates are low. I have filter bacteria in a bottle. Do I add some? If I do, do I turn my UV off so it can settle?
let me know what you guys think. Here’s a recovery pic
You dosed a bunch of bacteria. That bacteria effect will be the same as dosing “carbon dosing” or dosing microbacter7. These are things people dose to lower nutrient levels. Typically you will see the effects on nitrate before phosphate.
Also if you used a butt load of GAC this can filter out your dissolved organics which would without the activated carbon; normally break down into nitrates…
Shrimp are very sensitive to salinity swings. Any kind of parameter swings really.
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