Cali Kid Corals

Eric's 100 gallon adventure. (Formally 40g)

Since Monday I've noticed a couple pieces rtn and I have stn on a few others. So I test the water to see what's going on. Everything looked good. Last night I noticed my Walt Disney bone white. I test everything again. Then I decided to double check my hanna results with my salifert.

Salinity: 35
Ph: 8.1
Dkh: 8.7
No3: 10
Here comes the fun one...
Po4: 2.0!!!!

I'm assuming my sps isn't loving my super high phosphates. My hanna was reading 0.08. So last night I turned on my gfo reactor and I'm planning on doing a 50% water change tonight.

Oh well...
 
Coral reefer said:
Good question. Don’t have a concrete answer for you. Slower is better tho. Wouldn’t worry about the water change as much as gfo. Careful with gfo.
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I would add that slower is better usually. When you have something is known bad (like temp, alk or in this case po4), and it is really off, it should be ok to take a big swing at it. Now to me, that means take it from 2.0 to 1.0 with a 50% water change one day. Maybe another 50% the next to .5, or use gfo to take the rest out depending on patience or water supply. I have seen mine as high as .3 or .4 with no ill effects (outside of algae growth), and I have heard of other peoples tanks who run high all the time, so I would use .5 as sort of an upper acceptable (no longer an emergency and you can move slowly now) number. Best of luck and I hope things turn around!
 
H2OPlayar said:
I would add that slower is better usually. When you have something is known bad (like temp, alk or in this case po4), and it is really off, it should be ok to take a big swing at it. Now to me, that means take it from 2.0 to 1.0 with a 50% water change one day. Maybe another 50% the next to .5, or use gfo to take the rest out depending on patience or water supply. I have seen mine as high as .3 or .4 with no ill effects (outside of algae growth), and I have heard of other peoples tanks who run high all the time, so I would use .5 as sort of an upper acceptable (no longer an emergency and you can move slowly now) number. Best of luck and I hope things turn around!
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In my experience it doesn’t really work like that tho. It should by the numbers, but that first big change won’t get it from 2.0-1.0 and keep it there. Wether it’s continued input or stored up phosphate being released or what is hard to say. I agree tho, a 50% change if alk and temp are close and you’re good. I would likely start a phosphate reactor as well like the day after maybe at a low dosage and feed rate to minimize the chances that phosphate level climbs back up. Then maybe another big water change a few days later depending on testing.
 
Coral reefer said:
In my experience it doesn’t really work like that tho. It should by the numbers, but that first big change won’t get it from 2.0-1.0 and keep it there. Wether it’s continued input or stored up phosphate being released or what is hard to say. I agree tho, a 50% change if alk and temp are close and you’re good. I would likely start a phosphate reactor as well like the day after maybe at a low dosage and feed rate to minimize the chances that phosphate level climbs back up. Then maybe another big water change a few days later depending on testing.
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Totally agree, and I wasn't as in depth as I could have been. There are two issues to deal with. The place where the phosphate is coming from, and the phosphate in the water. The big water change should deal with today's issue of phosphate in the water, but the root cause of where is the phosphate coming from, and how is the reefer going to be dealing with the phosphate 2 to 6 to 12 months later. The reactor/fuge/algae turf scrubber work on the long term where water change, lanthanum chloride, and gfo are all more immediate and deal with the phosphate in the water today.

In practice, I bet you are right that 2 days of 50% w/c each day doesn't get you back to exactly .5, but I would be curious how close it does, ie how much p04 is stored up in the rocks and sand plus what is the daily addition from food?

I bet there was some heavy feeding going on in the last couple weeks, as that is how I have let my phosphates get up. Part of the solution is likely feeding a little less too until things get back to normal.
 
Po4 is down to 0.120 now. I got new reagent for my hanna and changed the batteries. The reagent I had said I still had two months left on it.
 
Was it a Hanna reagent error or did you just do a large water change and run GFO for it to drop down so quickly? Because I am also fighting high Po4 atm.
 
Just cleaned up the plumbing on my mixing station quite a bit. The two pumps and all that extra pvc really bothered me. This is going to be a lot better.

CollageMaker_20210701_220917406.jpg
 
Srt4eric said:
It looks like I have slightly elevated levels of zinc and copper.

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Stop scaping with the same gloves you braze with! ;)

Helpful advice would be run carbon and cupasorb, plus water changes. The bag that I got from Neptune wasn't a fine enough mesh to keep the cupasorb in the bag well, so I have a tighter mesh bag I got from AD.
 
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I shut off my return pump today to do some maintenance and such. Go to turn it back on and it spins up for a second and then shuts right off. It's a Jebao DCP-13000 and it's giving error 05. After a bit of panicking I remember I have two Varios 8s in my garage that I'm going to use on my new tank. A little bit of plumbing and I've got everything up and running. That was a bit more work than I wanted to do to the tank today.
 
Srt4eric said:
I shut off my return pump today to do some maintenance and such. Go to turn it back on and it spins up for a second and then shuts right off. It's a Jebao DCP-13000 and it's giving error 05. After a bit of panicking I remember I have two Varios 8s in my garage that I'm going to use on my new tank. A little bit of plumbing and I've got everything up and running. That was a bit more work than I wanted to do to the tank today.
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Wise you had backup! (or lucky)
 
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