Ignitros
Active Member
Hello Everyone! I recently had an experience that I've never had before in many, many years of reef keeping.
Life tends to have an ebb and flow. You have times where you are diligent and check your water parameters on schedule and do all of your scheduled maintenance when it's supposed to be completed and there are times where you are so busy or distracted with other things that your tank suffers and things start to spiral.
I recently had one of these episodes in my reef keeping life. We have been short handed at work so I've been filling in on days off and working many extra hours. This made spending time with family difficult so I tended to take what little time I had and focus it on family instead of the reef tank. My tank has been running for almost 2 years now and alot of tasks are automated now. ATO, doser and such. I haven't yet invested in an aquarium controller but that is something I'm working towards... hence all the extra hours and overtime pay.
Well... I started to notice that some corals were not overly happy and I finally decided that I really needed to get everything back in order before things got worse or spiraled out of control. I started by doing all my tank maintenance. Cleaned everything in the tank, including equipment and performed a water change then tested my water parameters... Everything came back right where it needed to be.
Temp : 79.1
Salinity : 1.026
Calcium : 410
ALK : 9.2 dKH
pH : 8.2
Mag : 1320
Nitrate : 0.2ppm
Nitrite : 0.2ppm
Phosphate : 0.03ppm
Ammonia : 0.01ppm
Everything looks good right? Why then are my corals showing obvious signs of something going on... not happy, polyps not extended, even some bleaching and tissue receding.
I started looking at things one at a time. I verified that the temp probe was clean and functioning and double checked the temp with an extra temp probe I have and that was good. I checked the salinity with my refractometer (I ran a calibration with RODI water and even purchased a new bottle of calibration fluid and performed another calibration) I checked the ground probe and verified with a multi-meter that there wasn't any stray voltage that could be causing issues. I ran every test multiple times and everything checked out. I even borrowed a friend's tests and did multiple tests with his. EVERYTHING kept coming back okay but still my corals looked unhappy and some looked downright in bad shape. I lost a few snails, my brittle star was not looking good losing legs and my urchin was losing spines... not to mention a couple Acros were going downhill fast.
Needless to say... I was stumped. I discussed with a few people here on R2R and locally about what could be going on. I got the typical answers and everyone was like do another water change so of course I did that and nothing. Things were still going down hill. I started changing out equipment thinking it could be something leaching from the pumps . No dice. Just when I was contemplating breaking the tank down and having friends house everything in the tank so it wouldn't die I was watching a BRS video about their WWC Method and they kept talking about redundancy, stability and reliability. While watching this video I noticed the worker for WWC was testing the water with a standard refractometer like mine and then they tested again with a Milwaukee digital refractometer.
This got me thinking... I don't have any other way of testing salinity (but I literally just calibrated mine... how off could it be?) It's been well taken care of... no rust and it seems fine. I thought about it for a bit then decided I would try this one last thing... so I went ahead and ordered a Milwaukee digital refractometer and had it sent next day air. After being delivered I opened the Milwaukee up and put it together. Ran the calibration then performed my first water test with it. It popped up with 1.010! I immediately grabbed the pipette and filled it with tank water and ran another test. It again came up with 1.010! So I then spent the next few days bringing the salinity back up to where it should have been at 1.026. I still have no idea why my old refractometer was so far off.
I'm writing this to help anyone new to the hobby or even someone established that just doesn't think about something as simple as this issue. We try our best to provide stability to our tanks and we try to think of every contingency... we have multiple return pumps and heaters in case one fails. We have backup plumbing and lighting options and through all this, something as easy and inexpensive to have as an extra refractometer or way to test salinity in another way I missed and it could have cost me more corals and livestock. It's something easily overlooked.
Life tends to have an ebb and flow. You have times where you are diligent and check your water parameters on schedule and do all of your scheduled maintenance when it's supposed to be completed and there are times where you are so busy or distracted with other things that your tank suffers and things start to spiral.
I recently had one of these episodes in my reef keeping life. We have been short handed at work so I've been filling in on days off and working many extra hours. This made spending time with family difficult so I tended to take what little time I had and focus it on family instead of the reef tank. My tank has been running for almost 2 years now and alot of tasks are automated now. ATO, doser and such. I haven't yet invested in an aquarium controller but that is something I'm working towards... hence all the extra hours and overtime pay.
Well... I started to notice that some corals were not overly happy and I finally decided that I really needed to get everything back in order before things got worse or spiraled out of control. I started by doing all my tank maintenance. Cleaned everything in the tank, including equipment and performed a water change then tested my water parameters... Everything came back right where it needed to be.
Temp : 79.1
Salinity : 1.026
Calcium : 410
ALK : 9.2 dKH
pH : 8.2
Mag : 1320
Nitrate : 0.2ppm
Nitrite : 0.2ppm
Phosphate : 0.03ppm
Ammonia : 0.01ppm
Everything looks good right? Why then are my corals showing obvious signs of something going on... not happy, polyps not extended, even some bleaching and tissue receding.
I started looking at things one at a time. I verified that the temp probe was clean and functioning and double checked the temp with an extra temp probe I have and that was good. I checked the salinity with my refractometer (I ran a calibration with RODI water and even purchased a new bottle of calibration fluid and performed another calibration) I checked the ground probe and verified with a multi-meter that there wasn't any stray voltage that could be causing issues. I ran every test multiple times and everything checked out. I even borrowed a friend's tests and did multiple tests with his. EVERYTHING kept coming back okay but still my corals looked unhappy and some looked downright in bad shape. I lost a few snails, my brittle star was not looking good losing legs and my urchin was losing spines... not to mention a couple Acros were going downhill fast.
Needless to say... I was stumped. I discussed with a few people here on R2R and locally about what could be going on. I got the typical answers and everyone was like do another water change so of course I did that and nothing. Things were still going down hill. I started changing out equipment thinking it could be something leaching from the pumps . No dice. Just when I was contemplating breaking the tank down and having friends house everything in the tank so it wouldn't die I was watching a BRS video about their WWC Method and they kept talking about redundancy, stability and reliability. While watching this video I noticed the worker for WWC was testing the water with a standard refractometer like mine and then they tested again with a Milwaukee digital refractometer.
This got me thinking... I don't have any other way of testing salinity (but I literally just calibrated mine... how off could it be?) It's been well taken care of... no rust and it seems fine. I thought about it for a bit then decided I would try this one last thing... so I went ahead and ordered a Milwaukee digital refractometer and had it sent next day air. After being delivered I opened the Milwaukee up and put it together. Ran the calibration then performed my first water test with it. It popped up with 1.010! I immediately grabbed the pipette and filled it with tank water and ran another test. It again came up with 1.010! So I then spent the next few days bringing the salinity back up to where it should have been at 1.026. I still have no idea why my old refractometer was so far off.
I'm writing this to help anyone new to the hobby or even someone established that just doesn't think about something as simple as this issue. We try our best to provide stability to our tanks and we try to think of every contingency... we have multiple return pumps and heaters in case one fails. We have backup plumbing and lighting options and through all this, something as easy and inexpensive to have as an extra refractometer or way to test salinity in another way I missed and it could have cost me more corals and livestock. It's something easily overlooked.
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