Deeper Well - An Acquasole 60

[markalot]

In my opinion, based on what I've read about PH and hard corals, a lot of damage will be done lower than 7.6ish.  This may explain your loss of hard corals over a night when everything else seemed just fine.

 

If you can somehow keep PH above 7.6 I think your hard coral issues will be solved.

[Asureef]

15 hours ago, jedimasterben said:

Dunno. Skimmer pulls outside air, too. Alkalinity is 7.5dKH.

 

Have you tried increasing your alk.? 

 

Mine was 7.7-8.1 at 7.5dkh 

I increased it to 8.5 and ph is now 7.9-8.3 

 

Btw, I also pull air from outside and the air line is connected to a co2 scrubber.  

 

[jedimasterben]

On 3/15/2017 at 10:42 PM, teenyreef said:

Oh no! You just seem to have the worst luck with fish sometimes, Ben

 

Any chance it was due to something in the air - cleaning materials or something like that?

Unlikely, I've banned my wife from all that shit.

 

On 3/15/2017 at 11:40 PM, William said:

Have you tested your ph manually (chemically with a kit), I would be Interested to see if it is the same. Do you have a gas stove/oven and have poor exhaust ventilation? When I turn my oven on in my small NYC apartment, the ph in my aquarium goes down (I now have a co2 scrubber on the skimmer air intake, and this does not happen as much).

do you heavily carbon dose? 

No, i don't own a pH test kit. I personally don't trust the hobby grade test kits any more than I do this probe. There is no gas service to any town near me, we only have electric. And no carbon dosing, the only thing that changed was the skimmer pump stopped. :/

 

On 3/16/2017 at 1:06 PM, markalot said:

In my opinion, based on what I've read about PH and hard corals, a lot of damage will be done lower than 7.6ish.  This may explain your loss of hard corals over a night when everything else seemed just fine.

 

If you can somehow keep PH above 7.6 I think your hard coral issues will be solved.

It's definitely possible. Someone on RC mentioned that it's very improbably pH dropped below 7.5, as the sand and rock would begin to dissolve and bring the pH back up, but I just compared against the ORP probe and it kinda confirms it.

 

On 3/16/2017 at 1:07 PM, Asureef said:

 

Have you tried increasing your alk.? 

 

Mine was 7.7-8.1 at 7.5dkh 

I increased it to 8.5 and ph is now 7.9-8.3 

 

Btw, I also pull air from outside and the air line is connected to a co2 scrubber.  

Alkalinity is about 7.5. It used to be about 5.5 but I raised it back up, looking back at my pH graphs they didn't really change much after that.

[markalot]

How about some kind of PH balancing substance in the sump?  Crushed coral sand or something like it?

 

I would go as far to say the fish maladies might be exaggerated by the swinging / low PH as well.  I realize you said you live in a fairly open house but perhaps testing the air is in order?  Lots of conditions can cause co2 pooling ... building on old landfills, something in the house leaking, really reaching here but might be worth a look. 

[jedimasterben]

10 hours ago, markalot said:

How about some kind of PH balancing substance in the sump?  Crushed coral sand or something like it?

 

I would go as far to say the fish maladies might be exaggerated by the swinging / low PH as well.  I realize you said you live in a fairly open house but perhaps testing the air is in order?  Lots of conditions can cause co2 pooling ... building on old landfills, something in the house leaking, really reaching here but might be worth a look. 

I have about 3.5" of sand in the display, half oolite and half larger grain.

 

I have always had a suspicion that the air quality in here is very poor, when it's all closed up I always seem to have relatively low energy, but I just can never seem to actually buy a device to measure CO2. And even then, there isn't really much I can do about it since it is either freezing or boiling outside with maybe five days a year that are in between

[ninjamyst]

will a hepa air filter help?

[kimberbee]

Was it farts?

[jedimasterben]

1 hour ago, ninjamyst said:

will a hepa air filter help?

Those are basically just very fine air filters to remove particulates. The only way to remove CO2 would be to use chemical media like soda lime (which would be $$$$$) or to open windows, which isn't much option here

1 minute ago, kimberbee said:

Was it farts?

Probably

[Christopher Marks]

This is quite a mystery.

 

Do you have an exhaust fan anywhere in the house, in a laundry room or bathroom? They're less common in older homes out here, but it's so dry. I wonder if it would make any difference to put one on a programmable switch. They're not too difficult to install if you need to add one to the house.

[jedimasterben]

3 hours ago, Christopher Marks said:

This is quite a mystery.

 

Do you have an exhaust fan anywhere in the house, in a laundry room or bathroom? They're less common in older homes out here, but it's so dry. I wonder if it would make any difference to put one on a programmable switch. They're not too difficult to install if you need to add one to the house.

Both bathrooms have them, but neither one exhausts outside, they only exhaust into the couple feet of space between the inside ceiling and roof. In the past (even before the tanks) I tried leaving one of them running but it didn't really help any, and it was loud as hell. There are quieter ones, I put one in the master bathroom, but it's a big hassle, this prefab house is awful to do anything with.

[William]

This is the CO2 scrubber I use 

[William]

You could also get a rough estimate of the co2 levels in your home by placing an air stone in 1 gal of Rodi water, leting it run overnight and then testing the ph and alkalinity of the water the next day. If there is significant CO2 in the air, you would expect a PH drop and some conversion on CO2 to carbonic acid 

[jedimasterben]

So it is about 72F outside and there is an alright breeze, so I opened up every window in the house. Right now, pH is 7.73. We'll see what happens.

 

 

This is the graph of the last 24 hours.

[Rehype]

3 hours ago, jedimasterben said:

So it is about 72F outside and there is an alright breeze, so I opened up every window in the house. Right now, pH is 7.73. We'll see what happens.

 

 

This is the graph of the last 24 hours.

 

 

Prepare for it to go up.....I used to have the same issue on my old tank and I ended up buying a CO2 scrubber.  But opening the windows definitely confirmed it for me. It only took a few hours.

 

Here what I was getting before the scrubber and after adding it:

 

 

 

 

 

 

[jedimasterben]

Just closed the windows. No change from typical.

 

 

[Rehype]

2 hours ago, jedimasterben said:

Just closed the windows. No change from typical.

 

 

 

You should leave them open overnight if possible ben.

[jedimasterben]

6 hours ago, Rehype said:

 

You should leave them open overnight if possible ben.

It was 46 this morning, so a bit too chilly for that. We're in one of our five days of winter.

 

But the working theory was that in leaving them open for the time I did with the breeze going (and my A/C set to just keep the fan going to circulate) was to exchange pretty much all the air with outside air, so in one night the delta in CO2 levels shouldn't be that high.

 

Also remember that my skimmer is still pulling outside air directly, as well. This was more of a last-ditch effort to eliminate some possible causes.

[markalot]

If the source is outside air then this won't help.  CO2 doesn't have to be at dangerous levels to wreak havok on a tank.  IMO anyway.

[jedimasterben]

Well, ####. Again. I lost the smaller of the two clownfish (I started to notice some aggression from the larger clown a couple days before it disappeared) a few days ago, and this afternoon when I got home I was looking at the tank and realized the longfin clown wasn't around. I look behind the rocks and there is its body, along with the almost completely disintegrated body of the angelfish AND ANOTHER ####ING BLUE GUDGEON that I haven't seen for six months. Really getting tired of this shit.

[vlangel]

O wow Ben, I am sorry about the fish.  I don't even know what to suggest.  I hope you can figure it out though.

[kimberbee]

[William]

Maybe send off a triton test, see if snubbing weird comes up.

[jedimasterben]

35 minutes ago, William said:

Maybe send off a triton test, see if snubbing weird comes up.

But what would be affecting the fish so badly and not the corals?

 

It is actually easier (and much cheaper) to do a 100% water change, especially now that I finally got some more salt in. I might do that at some point soon. Been I think four months?

[markalot]

I think the big drop in PH in introducing extra stress that is allowing something else to kill the fish.  I have ich (crypt) in both my tanks, always have, always will.  Any stress due to water quality issues can cause an outbreak, or a more intense outbreak I can see.  Fix the crazy PH drop and I bet some of these weirdo issues vanish.

[jedimasterben]

I have been dumping a kalk slurry into the tank to bring up cal and alk, maybe keeping alk somewhere around 12-14 will keep it a bit higher.