help please

Po4

 

SG is also a tad on the low side IMO. What wattage halides are you running. Color temp? How close to the water?

 

Ugh... does ick attack have copper in it? I know most ick medications are devastating on a reef, even those that say reef safe. I would discontinue that immediately. I fyou are having problem with ick, treat your fish sepparately in a QT and let the tank fallow.

 

One thing I have learned fishyness is that PO4 may read 0 but that doesn't mean its not there. All that hair algae you had would have been using up the PO4 before it could be measured by your tests.

 

If you are useing a liquid test kit to test phosphate the results are worthless. For sps to thrive you need to get your po4 under 0.05 and keep it there. Your SG should be 1.025 to 1.026

 

Also with only 150w bulbs I would run them a bit longer say 7 hours or so. As Bela said above that ick treatment is most likely the cause.

 

I was reading what's in it. Frankly, I can't really find any success stories. As a general rule, from all the reading I have done, it is wise to just avoid ich medications in a reef tank all together. I would seriously consider discontinuing the use of it. Also, I haven;t seen it mentioned, but you should frag off the healthy tissue of your RTN pieces and get the RTN out of the tank ASAP too. As far as the lighting goes, you are probably fine. How high are the lights and what kind of reflectors?

 

You shouldn't have to do hypo in the main tank. Just let it fallow (no fish for 6-8 weeks). Keep the fish in a QT and keep the display going as normal. Basically you kill off the ich by not letting it complete its life cycle. It will die off in that time with no fish in the tank.

 

temp-right now 82.4 halides are on
What is your tank temp when the halides are off? I have heard many stories of temp swings bringing RTN on....

 

I keep my tank around 1.023-1.024, and have no ill effects from it at all. If you've seen Ching Chi's tank on reefcentral you'll see that its amazing, and I believe he keeps his salintiy at 1.023 as well. Best bet is the ich meds, they may not have copper, but there are all sorts of other things in them that we just don't know how they affect corals.
SPS can just be tricky too. I've brought some home from thesame tank before and one will thrive and another won't make it. I've even had frags that I've fragged off of the same coral do the same, one rtn's and the other grows like crazy.

 

It's ich attack I tried it a year ago and it wiped out almost all of my corals. Run a lot of carbon and do large water changes every two days for at least 2 weeks to get that crap out of your tank

 

btw, if you do use the phosquard (little white pellets) make sure you rinse it really well in R/O water before you put it in your tank. its been known to release aluminum as a by-product of the reactions and from the dust. phos-ban or rowa phosremover are two products to look into.