Well I made a couple of real bone head mistakes this past week that may cost me dearly.
Here is the story: My reef tank has had chronic low PH for the past 6 years since moving into this house due to a overly sealed home causing less oxygen rich air and an abundance of CO2. Never been real concerned but always wondered what could be with a normal PH range. I have tried a few things to help over the years with no real success until of late.
I purchased a Coralife SL-65 High Pressure Super Luft Pump last Wednesday from Pet Solutions that is capable of pumping large amounts of outside air directly into the sump or skimmer to drive out the CO2. Because we were leaving for vacation the plan was not to hook it up until I got back this week.
Well boredom Thursday night got the best of me and I thought "it is just an air pump what could go wrong".
Breaking the cardinal rule to not make a tank change one week prior to going out of town I hooked it up.
When I woke Friday morning the PH was 8.05.... Which it normally would be 7.85 - 7.90 at that hour with an AlK level of 9.5DKH. So I was pretty happy with the result only being on for 12 hours and thought it was worth the money spent and trouble installing it.
Off I went on Vacation not really giving the tank much thought returned this evening. First thing I looked at when I got home was the Reef Keeper and the PH was 8.20. The happiness lasted about 1 second. Looked in the tank and found 2 baseball size SPS completely lost and many others in really bad shape. First thing I did was pull out a handheld PH meter to confirm the reading on the RK. Then grabbed an Alkalinity test kit and got a reading of 6.7DKH. “WHAT!†Opened a brand new kit of another brand and 6.4DKH. Thinking OMG NO… how could this be. I checked my dosing pumps and noticed they had not been dosing full doses of ALK since I left for vacation.
It took me an hour to finally figure out what happened:
As a safety precaution the dosing pumps are connected to a PH meter. If PH ever hits 8.25 they shutdown as a fail safe. Since I never was able to hit 8.25 even with a DKH of 11 in the past (Unless my windows were open for a couple days) it was a safe value to set until now. The new air pump did such a good job fixing the chronic low PH problem that it was hitting a PH of 8.25 after a few minutes of the pumps being on so it was never really dosing much of any ALK for that past 6 days. Since I normally run a high Alk level system 9.5dkh-10.5dkh the corals could not acclimate to that low of a level even with a good PH.
So to make matters worse what did I do…. manually dosed 110ML of Alk.
It had been so long since manually dosing that I remembered the amounts wrong. 110ML was total dose for a 24 period. MY PH jumped to 8.44 and Alk went from 6.7dkh – 9dkh in a matter of minutes.
At this point I have no idea what will happen to the tank over the next couple of days. The air Pump is off to help reduce the PH level. Even though I have 50 gallons of premixed saltwater I decided against doing a water change as to not shock more then I already have. Just going to let things come back down on their own. The calcium is at 500 and it normally runs 420-430. I am guessing that has something to do with the corals being stressed and not using the calcium that has been dosed over the past week.
I pulled the dead and dying corals out of the tank and going to check ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels shortly.
Thanks for listening to my issues and open to any suggestions,
Brian