coral troubles

[justahobby]

The DIY was baking soda cooked. I also stopped dosing the alk and did water changes..... problem continued. The only constant has been the coralife salt. I will be testing ammonia when I get home. When I read Sherita's thread it seems like the issue was Coralife not RC.

[Europhyllia]

Short story, I got a new bucket of salt, did water change 2 days ago, matching salinity, temp, ph, alk. Right after the change, everything got really mad.

The new bucket of salt is Reef Crystals, the old bucket is Coralife. Something I noticed........the Coralife bucket has no odor to it, the Reef Crystals has some kind of odor.......hard to describe.

What is your alkalinity measurement?

[Big_Pun]

what are you using baking soda for? bio cubes are easy to keep parameters at appropriate levels just do water changes, way to easy to overdose 14g system. I've been using reef crystals for 2 years with no problems and looking around the net there is no evidence that a bad batch was put out.
do you have your own ro/DI system, check that out.

[justahobby]

The way I read it Karin is she purchased a new bucket of salt (coralife). Things got mad and she ended up getting a newer bucket of salt (rc) so the new became the old.

My current alk is 2 meq/l. I stopped dosing the alk and did water changes which why it is low.

[justahobby]

I promise the alkalinity is not the problem.

[justahobby]

Ammonia results:

My tank: 0.3
Coralife: 6.0 (not a typo!)
RODI: 0

[justahobby]

Also, 6.0 is as the limit the test shows. I am amazed at how well my tank was able to process the ammonia. Of course it was at the expense of coral :-(

[Europhyllia]

weird!

My next guess would have been the aluminum from the baking soda but I guess it's your ammonia.

[LuckySingh]

bro i completely understand how stressful it is when u deal with the situation like this knowing ur live stock is still in the polluted water....dosing could effect biocube in seconds in a improper manner...before u run any chemical through it i would suggest to hve someone else run a few test of ur water....however the chances of the salt to play foul in this situation is still hard to figure but possible...u might hve sme dead critter ...
how deep is ur sand bed??...i would say gently stirr ur sand bed by putting ur fingers through it slowly to let pass sme oxygen through it and increase a bit of flow in ur tank aswell..leave the top open if u hve the lid on it..keep us updated

[justahobby]

New batch of Red Sea salt mixing and tested:

Ammonia: ZERO