Help me get ready for SPS - 3 Big problems.

Stop talking about dosing. You are not ready to even look at dosing set ups. You need to correct the balance (that's not "dosing"), figure out your tank's consumption (also not dosing) before you can even try to start calculating if you need to dose. You may be able to get by with kalk in your top off water, which would save you a ton of money on dosing pumps.

 

I think the best advice to start was to test your freshly made saltwater mix. See what your numbers are and then go from there......

 

hahaha. To be honest i'm a little bit excited . If I start dosing its just like taking off the training wheels and riding with the big boys/girls

Will be doing that as soon as I get home . So keen to get on this

 

This

 

Day 3 test: Interesting results.

Ca 420 (Test 1), 400 (Test 2)
Alk 9.7 (Test 1), 9.8 (Test 2)
Mg 1200 (Test 1), 1200 (Test 2).

Tomorrow morning I am going to test my water change water, and do a 10% water change.

I am going to dose as per the guidelines on the back of the Red Sea bottles to get my Mg to 1350 and my Ca to 450.

 

Can you use a DIY Magnesium supplement to raise your Mag? It'll be cheaper. We have Bulk Reef Supply here that we can order the supplement premixed (just add water). Super cheap compared to bottled. Remember... only 100 ppm max raise in a day. You can use the calculator at BRS if you find the stuff for the DIY supplement.

You may want to read this article... very informative.
Do-It-Yourself Magnesium Supplements for the Reef Aquarium by Randy Holmes-Farley - Reefkeeping.com

 

those numbers look pretty good to me!

 

I've had similar experiences and I don't know that the solution is clearly explicable. I spent a lot of time putting in a test frag, staring at it all day waiting for something to go right then watching it slowly wither and die.

Now I stick corals in and they do fine without even a second thought. What has changed from then till now is hard to put a finger on. Its a lot of little things. I'll tell you where I would start though:

1. The big three. The discussion in this thread is insufficiently clear. You need to get these stable. When they're stable, you'll know it. Until then, it will seem like nothing you do gets it right. My personal method for getting things stable is to raise Mag to about 1500 (it won't harm anything and you're a good long way from being too low) first, done slowly over time. Once you're there, you raise you Alk to about 8. If you're using two part, use a calculator, manually dose the Alk part and dose an equal amount of the calcium part. If you're doing regular water changes, I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about Cal, it will be fine following the standard two part dosing. The water changes help correct for any problems. 1200 is not a safe place to keep your magnesium level. It may look alright, but testing errors, or other in tank reactions could be causing it to look better than it actually is. Get it at least to 1400. 1500 is fine.

2. I was once a huge fan of LEDs. I am now less so. That said, people have success with them, so if its what you have, they'll be fine. The trick however is to lower their output. Cut them back to 35% or thereabouts. Add your corals, give them some time, and only then start bumping the light up. I had no end of light acclimation issues with LED.

3. Make sure you have the flow. Not much else to say here. It is almost the case that more random flow is always good for SPS as long as you're not jetting it directly at the coral.

4. I'd use biopellets and a good skimmer. The system seems to work well. You can dose bacteria in addition and should get a happy environment as a result. Just learn to watch the pellets and recognize the signs of clumping. You want to keep them tumbling slowly and that requires ongoing attention.

Hope this helps.

 

+1 to all of this.

 

Mike hit it on the head. I recently went throuhgh a period where I let my attention to my tanks lapse. When I finally started getting back into the swing of things I had 350 ca, 1100 Mg and 6.0 dKh. Most people would tell you those parameters are way too low for SPS. Yet my corals not only survived, but experienced some growth.

So what is it? What makes some people able to grow SPS under sub-standard "key parameter" levels?

In my opinion it's two things (and this will engender a lot of discussion): Stability and skimming.

Keep your parameters stable and skim the sh!t out of your tank. Yes, individual corals need certain elements (like iodine for montis), but in general if you keep your water pristinely clean and don't change parameters too often then your SPS will do ok.

Now I will say that when my Ca, Mg and Alk got back up to decent levels the growth just took off, but the corals "survived" while they were low.

The one exception was that my iodine levels dropped way too low and I lost a couple montis.