Beginner moving tanks and coral health advice

[Grunt_S80]

For some background on myself, I started in the aquarium hobby a few years ago and was running only freshwater tanks. A few months ago I bought a saltwater 5 gallon cube setup with an aquaclear 20, some live rock, a heater, coralbox aqua led light, and a clown fish. Since then I've added sand, a porcelain crab, a green star polyps frag, a Kenya tree leather frag, a green birdsnest frag, a birds of paradise frag, a powerhead and I also changed the filter media and basket.

 

I've been running the light on the default lps schedule and it was only recently that I added all but the gsp frag (guy on kijiji sold me the other 3 for $10 each) I wanted to change my lighting to the sps when I added the sps but it seemed to bother everything so I left it and all seemed to be fine. Slowly the green birdsnest has lost colour and I'm assuming its dead, I've also been worried about the birds of paradise because less polyps have been out recently and I think it might be due too much light (tidal gardens says the green skeleton varieties require less)

 

This is all during the process of moving to a 10 gallon tank because I want a goby and shrimp pair, which I wanted to add before the clown. I moved over the large LR from the 5 gallon and left the small one that houses the crab, I also moved over almost all the sand to add for the 10 gallon. I moved the sand over a week ago and it's possible that's when they started going downhill, but they seemed fine. I tested the water yesterday and all seemed fine except my phosphates where high but I assumed it was because I just added ro to top off (my ro isn't 0tds, more like 2-4). My gsp are basically bulletproof but have been closed for over a day since I handled them physically. 

 

Sorry for the formatting because I'm in mobile and I'll figure out how to post photos if anyone needs them. Thanks.

[SaltyBuddha]

New lights, flow and placement can affect corals. I've had some corals close up for 3 weeks when I move them or change flow. Toadstool was the absolute worst. Thing was an ugly blob for over almost a month.

 

Depending on how much LR you moved from the 5 gallon to the 10 gallon, the 5g could go through a mini cycle. The majority of the bacteria is on the LR. Move too much LR (bacteria) and the remaining LR will have to populate more bacteria to keep up with the bioload. Never hurts to test for ammonia or nitrite when moving rocks/sand. Seachem's Prime is always an option when moving stuff around just to be safe. You also could have released some nasty nutrients from moving the sand.

 

TDS of 2 to 4 actually isn't that bad.

 

Keep things consistent, test for ammonia/nitrite, use some Prime if you want and do some water changes. Keep lights/flow the same and let the corals acclimate.

 

SPS are harder in smaller tanks and are really sensitive to any changes in SG, Alk, Temp, anything