Water parameters question? Please help.

[Mr. Clownfish]

So my tank has been running for a couple months now. It's a JBJ 45 gallon. I have 4 fish 2 clowns and 2 fire fish. CUC and a bunch of frags. Zoas, hammer, Frogspaw, a few leather, Acan, GSP, Xenia and a toadstool. I did a 15 gallon water change last weekend. Everything is looking great and all of the corals have good polyp extension. But I'm concerned about my water parameters, most the alkalinity because it's low. But I don't want to change anything if I'm just over reacting for nothing. He is my test results from today's test. Let me know what you think.

 

PH - 8.0

Ammonia - 0.25

Nitrite - 0.00

Nitrate - 0.00

Calcium - 500ppm

Magnesium - 1400ppm

Alkalinity - 8.4

 

I'm using Red Sea test kits for everything.

[Benny314]

I would be very alarmed at any reading of ammonia, that should be zero.

Everything else looks good as long as it's not fluctuating massively.

Your stocking is all fairly tolerant, alk doesn't have to be way up, natural sea water is around 7, but 9 is a good number to aim for as it gives you some head room before things go bad if it goes up or down slightly.

Running at 7 ish if it were to drop you'd have problems and running at 12 if it jumped up again you'd have some issues.

[Exodus]

As for the ammonia be sure to take some freshly mixed RODI water mixed with salt and perform the test on that in 1 vile, set that aside and do another test on your tank and compare the 2, allot of people get confused with the API test kit because the shade they have printed for 0 is not correct.

 

I can see your concern on the Alk because it seems a tad disproportionate to your higher Calcium and Magnesium so something in your tank is eating it, do you have a bunch of coraline Algae? As for Ideal ranges you have nothing to worry about as Benny stated your in good ranges, but I personally would just keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't deviate much further downward, if the levels stay the same with scheduled maintenance after a few weeks then your fine and thats just where your levels are going to sit.

 

Oh one last thing forgot to mention, not every batch of salt is the same, perform the alk test on a fresh batch before added to the tank and see if the levels are similar as well.

[Mr. Clownfish]

I'm pretty sure the ammonia is probably nothing more then a bad reading from the test. This has been the same test results for the Cal, Mag and Alk for the past few weeks. Everything is surprisingly very stable. The only thing I have added in the past few weeks was a few Zoa frags that I picked up while I was on vacation. I have a little bit more algae then I would like to see but I think I need to adjust my skimmer. I set it to run a dry skim while we went away for a week so it didn't overflow.

 

But if you guys say not to worry about the Alk then I'll just leave it alone and keep testing on a regular basis to make sure everything stays in check.

 

Thanks

[Benny314]

Yeah just keep an eye on it.

 

I had a phosphate issue and have just set up a reactor which has stopped my few SPS pieces losing colour and now they have started showing growth again also my LPS has taken off the last few weeks and this seems to be sucking up all my alk. I had it pretty much at 9, but I'm struggling to keep it at 8 at the minute. Really need to get a dosing pump, that'll help.

[Mr. Clownfish]

How do you dose for Alk?

[Benny314]

I'm adding sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water.

I used the mixing ratio recommended in the 2 part instructions/recipe I found online. I'm using calcium chloride dehydrate flake and magnesium chloride hexahydrate flake to make up my cal and mag solutions.

 

You can buy pre made mag, cal and alk solutions, but they are very expensive when you can make your own so cheaply.