Reef Help

[Mopar32985]

Well to start off with i have a 29 US gallon tank. Witha fuval 104 canister filter, Coralife 65 watt light, and im not sure but about 45 to 55 lbs of LR. I have been treating it everyother day with B-Ionic part 1&2. My problem is about 4 months ago my system crashed and had almost all my corals die on me. It now has been cycling for all that time and now seens to be really good. Starting to get purple specs of corline alge. Does this setup sound good to you guys and is there anything i should change. Thanks for any help

P.S. Can post if it will help of the tank how it is now and how it was with all the coral.

 

[SkiFletch]

Gah, stop dosing

Never, ever, ever dose what you cannot test for. B-ionic primarily serves to add alkalinity (alk, or carbonate hardness), and calcium (calc). It also doses other trace elements like magnesium and a few others, but thats not important for our discussion here. Alk and calc are two related parts of saltwater chemistry. Over-dosing in one or underdosing in one can cause a crash in one, or both of the two values. Crashes in calc or alk WILL lead to massive death events of corals in the tank which is probably what happened to you in the first place. I suggest reading up on saltwater chemistry before you continue dosing, and get a calcium and alkalinity (carbonate hardness) tester. Acceptable values for a reef are calc of 400-500ppm and alk of 9-12dKH. If you go too far over or under either of those two levels, you're in danger of hurting things in your tank. However, correcting the values quickly will be equally detrimental, so take it SLOWLY.

 

[Great Lakes]

Agreed!
Ditch dosing.
They make so many wonderful chemicals to put in your tank. But nearly all of them are superflous for the mainstream marine enthusiast.

GL