My moment of laziness/stupidity

[bwig333]

So a little background. I have a 90g bowfront with sps, zoas, fish, and the regular clean up crew. I have only had the sps in since the first of the year, so I have become much more inclined to check my calcium, mag, alk, and phos.( a little side note: i keep the results in a small book, so I can look back on them from time to time). As far as maintenance, I will do about a 10% water change per month. I dose kalk about 2xs per week and then I dose Red Sea reef energy and coral colors. All corals seem to be doing well, except I had an acan that turned orange and I have a monti that is beginning to turn bright orange( it is blue with pink/red polyps).
Looking back in my online journal I noticed that I have not checked the salinity in my tank since Jan 2013. I decided to check it today, and it is terribly low 31ppt. I normally check it monthly just to ease my mind. I know that salinity is one of the basic things we should check, but somehow I let it slip. Now I start the process of slowly increasing it by adding mixed(salt) water as my top off instead of just ro/di.
Fortunately i have not lost any livestock, and i realize that I need to check salinity more often even with regular water changes. Thankfully I was looking back at my data over the last 9 months and caught my problem before it was catastrophic.
Has anyone else had similar issues, whether it be salinity or some other basic parameter that is not checked on a weekly/biweekly basis?

 

[debdp]

That's not terribly low, but I would recommend checking it every time you do a water change. My salinity if left unchecked would slowly creep up from 1.025 to 1.028 even with auto top off. So when I mix my saltwater for a water change I have the salinity at about 1.023. I've only had the reverse issue once when a snail weighed down the float valve but the salinity only dropped to 1.023, so I made the salt mix 1.027 and made multiple smaller changes over a few days to bring it up.

 

[etphi]

I have made that mistake too. I've let my salt creep up (don't remember the exact amount), but my corals started to show signs of stress. Because of my laziness, I ended up losing quite a few of my favorite corals.