Growing your corals

C

ceriff

I have a few questions about my reef. I have been going on the current setup for about 9 months now and some of the stuff just doesn't seem to do as well as others. Now I have dealt with nitrate issues and am working on getting them all the way down so I know that has some to do with things but I have some of the corals that I would think would be the harder ones to keep and they do the best, and others should be easy and they don't do well. It is mainly that my softer corals do bad and my harder corals do great. Frogspawn is the only exception to the harder of the corals as it doesn't do great. I have montipora that explodes, candy canes that look amazing, and great looking hydropora. I have also had my nems with no losses. I went from compact fluorescent to metal halides about 6 months ago, it has three 250 watt metal halides and 2 96 watt CF's. I have had them about 8-10 inches above the water but just moved them up to 12" now. The tank is 18" tall so should this be good now, and could this have anything to do with some corals doing great and others not?
 
@ceriff wrote:
I have a few questions about my reef. I have been going on the current setup for about 9 months now and some of the stuff just doesn't seem to do as well as others. Now I have dealt with nitrate issues and am working on getting them all the way down so I know that has some to do with things but I have some of the corals that I would think would be the harder ones to keep and they do the best said:
Depends on your parameters... please post your dkh (alk), ca and mg levels.

Also softies tend to do better in 'dirtier' water so higher nitrates are actually preferred, to the tune of 5-20 ppm. Flow has a lot to do with things as well and if you have trouble with softies and LPS like hammers etc, it could be a combination of flow and light.
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Well, here we go

Am=0
Nitrite=0
Nitrate=20-40 (haven't check in a couple days since water change)
ph=8.0
calc=450
alk 7.0 deg
phos=0
3- hydro korilia #4's on a 6' tank
mag 12 return

I have tried to not blast the LPS's but make sure they have decent flow, should I be hitting them pretty hard?
 
@ceriff wrote:
Well said:
any idea what your mag level is?? I would bump your alk up slowly over a period of days to 8.5 or 9.0. The nitrates are higher than I would be comfortable with, but if you can get them cut in half that would be fine for a mixed tank. The flow seems to be fine. The only other thing I would point to is the lighting. 250W over 18" of water is quite a bit. SPS would love it, but the softies might cook a bit.
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@DaveJ wrote:
The only other thing I would point to is the lighting. 250W over 18" of water is quite a bit. SPS would love it said:
I really wondered about this, I have moved the lights up a couple more inches and I set the two outer halide lamps to run a few hours shorter and we will see if that helps a little.
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@ceriff wrote:
[I]@DaveJ wrote:[/I][quote=" The only other thing I would point to is the lighting. 250W over 18" of water is quite a bit. SPS would love it said:
I really wondered about this, I have moved the lights up a couple more inches and I set the two outer halide lamps to run a few hours shorter and we will see if that helps a little."]

If that is the issue, that would help or at least give you an indication if its the total problem. It may take a week or two to see any difference however.
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