water is turning in to milk

starting to precipitate (what does that mean)

 

bump

 

the calcium comes out of the water, many refer to this as "snowing" because thats what it looks like.

 

why would calcium come out of the water?

 

Because your chemistry is not balanced. Ca Mg and Alk all react with each other. They balance out, not directly but generally.

Your Ca is not "too" high, but it is very high for your alk. We don't know what your Mg is. Usually CO2 effects PH more in the Winter because the house is closed up. But that causes low PH. If CO2 is not a factor in your Ph, then having a PH of 8.6 and a very low Alk of 2.8 is quite odd.

Your numbers do not seem balanced. If concentrations of one thing or another are out of whack and get to high then they fall out of solution.

So what chemicals are you adding? How much and how ofter?

 

set tank up on 2/15/10.
stay stable for three days now.
getting whiter for a little more then a week.
have macro algae in fuge(cheato)
29 gallon tank/ 10 gallon wet/dry/ 7 gallon fuge
60 lbs of live sand some it all three tanks
2 packs of pods
the only thing added is (Prime)
and i started the the tank(Micro Bacter7)


picture is from today

 

picture from set up date2/19/2010 and it look this way until a week ago.

 

how did you mix your salt? what is your salinity/ spec. gravity? Did you add bagged live sand?

Maybe... and this is just a maybe, but since you have no real livestock, you could remix the water with a fresh batch of salt and replace it all - or maybe half of it?

 

Well...didn't know this tank was brand new. All you have is fresh salt water....chemistry is a bit off. Work on getting that in reasonable range. Won't be hard. It could be from high ph sand, rocks.... do you have a skimmer going? without any fish there is no need for cheato...it has nothing to feed off of yet. It will though.

 

mixed salt with water then put it in the tank always reads 1.025
all most 70 lbs of bagged live sand
no skimmer yet
there is a green mandarin in there and a pom pom 30 or so snails some have laid eggs on the glass.