Neptune Aquatics

Chasing...

houser

houser

Past President
BARcard
Small issues...

So about 11 days or so ago I noticed my alk jug was empty. Probably had just ran out. So I topped that jug off to match the level of my ca jug. Fast forward 9 days and I took a look at the jugs and the alk was empty again.
But the Ca jug was the same level. Uh oh - somethings wrong. Well my BM 3 channel doser pump assigned to Ca was dead.
Did a test and 300. Uh oh, replumbed Ca to the Mg channel and upped the dose to raise about 25ppm a day. No big deal.
Tonight I look in and all is fine except this one beautiful violet milli frag is like cream colored. Uh oh. All else ok though. A little investigation shows I had allowed the peri tube to fold over and pinch the line. So no Alk for 2 days - and test said 4 (down 3 degrees.)
Got everything squared away again and set Alk to raise a degree per day.
Too fast? Too slow? I have no experience in this zone and want to get out of it as safely as possible.
 
I would raise it over the course of a day, 4 actually is not too bad, the corals just shut down, so the milli should bounce back fairly quick. IMO it is better to get the coral into proper water quality than to acclimate it, look at it this way, if I were to take that coral and put it into my tank the parameters would be different yet the coral would be happy.
 
Ok. I'm guessing that if (when) it draws down a meq/d then I better watch out!
Rather than just boost alk I also am boosting ca as well, with the expectation they will rise together easier, then I'll back off ca more. Ok?
 
Funny thing in all this is up until I just got new test kits I had let the tank tell me what was going on via observation since early last November. Aside from a Mg sanity check a few months ago it was pretty smooth!
 
I went that route a while back and my cal got down to 280, I couldn't tell there was a problem, everything looked OK. After realizing I had a problem and correcting it, that's when the corals started having trouble, seems like it took a while for the symptoms to show themselves.
 
Test kits are a pain, but they help with stability, the most important factor in reefing. I hate them as much as you Erin, I use them all day long.
 
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