SPS Quarantine Tank Assistance

[Tinpanva]

I has made a 12x12x12 rimless tank into a quarantine tank. It's been up and running for just over 4 months now. I've been fragging off some of my NoTG and some zoas as "test" frags to make sure all is good to go with the system.

Once the frags are in the tank they don't really brown out, but they do lack the pop and luster of how they look in my display tank. The polyps on the NoTG never extend and the zoas only half open. They will stay like this for months until the slowly fade and die off.

The tank did cycle in the begining, and nothing was added until it was stable and no trace of ammonia. The calc and alk are a little high but stable. The downside to using RSCP salt. I do 1 to 1.5 gal water changes weekly. The lights are homemade LEDS from rapid LED, with uv, blues, whites and moon lights. I have these controlled via a small remote control where full strength is 15 "clicks" of the remote. I'm not really sure the light has much to do with.polyp extension but the current setting is 7 clicks on blues, 3 on white, 5 on uv, 8 on moon lights. So maybe 50% ish?

Flow is provided by a HOB filter, the ac50, which I would have thought would be plenty. No skimmer as I'm doing weekly waterchanges. Corals shouldn't be starving as I also have a lawnmower blenny keeping the lawn mowed and providing the poop.

I have a spare mp10 I could put in there but feel that's going to be way too much flow. Since I've hit that brickwall of figuring this out I need some fresh ideas and new perspectives.

 

Edit : I've also added a chip of my Monti to the tank, same thing going on, no polyps.

 

Bring it on peeps!

[jservedio]

Needs more flow. If it is for SPS only, there is no reason not to put in a couple strong powerheads. Since there is no rock, gyre flow is incredibly easy to get set up.

 

Unless you want to do very large (like 50-100%) water changes per week when you have coral in there, you might want to use a small single rock just to process any ammonia. Monitor Alk every couple of days while acros are in there - they still like to grow in QT.

 

Here is what I had set up before everything went in and before a 3rd powerhead went in - it supported 20 someodd acros for 3 months during/after dealing with AEFW before I put the rock on and didn't lose anything in the QT tank after dips were done. It was a single 1.5-2lb piece of rock from my sump.

 

For a bare bottom acro tank, there is really no such thing as too much flow - when everything was in there, it had a minimum of 1700gphand max of a little over 3,000gph in a 10g tank.

[Tinpanva]

So even my spare mp10 would be just fine, I'll start it on the lowest setting and see how she does.

 

I also tested the water this past weekend and found the calcuim quite low at 370ppm. I know when my cal gets that low in my display tank my SPS starts the STN and polyps close up. I surprises me it's so low, I use RSCP salt and that is supposed to mix at 450ish. I do weekly waterchanges so I'm like WTF?

[jservedio]

Yeah, it'll drop like a rock when it's full of SPS - you should definitely have some sort of dosing system in place to handle it with such little volume. I would run the MP10 at like 35-50% and get a nice gyre going.

[Tinpanva]

Yeah, but there only one spin there currently, a chunk of monti, it's not really growing which is why I'm so suprised. I have a set of 1.1ml pumps on the main display

[Reefkid88]

I'm curious,what salinity are you mixing to and what're the rest of your parameters coming out to ?

[Tinpanva]

I weigh my salt out so it stays exactly at 1.026

Po4 - 0 ppm

KH - 9.41 dkh

Mg - 1300

CA - 400

NO3 - 0 ppm

pH - 8

Temp - 77