Kalkwasser dosing?

[Texex]

Howdy Everyone,

 

This is my first time posting on this siteand my first saltwater tank of any kind. I absolutely love the information that I've picked up from this site. It's helped me tremendously in getting things going in my new 10G nano-reef. I've done extensive reading on the internet, and am still a little confused as to when is dosing with Kalkwasser necessary.

 

My tank has been set up for ~3 weeks. It went through a nasty red slime algae outbreak in the first week because I was stupid and listened to the guy at the LFS. I bought way too many snails and hermit crabs at first and ended up with too much nitrates. I've since done water changes to bring the level down and added some macroalgae to the tank to help maintain nitrates. I've since then been keeping the levels at 0-5ppm. Lighting is a little low at 3.6W/G, but I'll be bumping that up to around 7.1W/G soon. Right now there isn't any actinic, but the 9 watt bulb is on the way. In the future, I intend to add a second 36 watt mixed bulb and remove the 2X13 daylight and 9 watt actinic. That should give me more room to work with and also add just a little light.

 

Now to my main question. I've noticed lately that my coraline live rock (which is purple coral) is starting to get a little washed out in color. Is this a result of a shortage of calcium. The LFS is getting the Salifert Calcium kit in this weekend, so I'll be able to tell better then. It just looks like things have bleached out some. I've been pretty religious about doing water changes at 20% once a week. SG is in the range and pH is around 8.4. KH is 9. Any ideas?

 

Would adding some soft corals affect the live rock? I've start locating various copepods and other neat little things in the tank aside from the mushroom, bunch of polyps, and finger colt (?) that we added over the weekend. All of these were VERY small so that the bioload could be minimized. We now only have 3 snails, 3 hermits (2 small blue legs and 1 red leg), and one small nassarius (?) snail for the invert package. No slime algae, but a little dusting of green algae on the glass.

 

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Thank.

Texex

[LiQuiD]

White can mean 2 thing. If it is uniformly turning white all over it could be dieing. Check the Ca and if low get it raised. If it has like little white bumps on it like little volcanos with white sand sized pieces coming out the top, then this is good and it is reproducing and letting out spores. If it is just a fading all over white, it may be on it's way out. With the light you have now, I have found that pink and green coraline do very well but think the deep purple needs more light for whatever reason. Just keep your Ca up after you get the test kit and you should be OK, it takes a while to totally kill off coraline.