Help ! tank is crashing ! What if I do 100% PWC

[joeyfromlawrenceville]

Hi gang,
here is the deal, 24 Aquapod reef only, year old now. No problems at all for last year, floods in Georgia soaked my carpet in my basement , used Oust odor control down there, where I keep my new water vat ready for the PWC's. After using the oust down there I rinsed the vat and discard the water, I did not actually clean the vat. the vat was in the room that I sprayed almost a whole can of air freshener in though. I did a water change and shortly after the corals started going down hill, looking bad, not opening up . I replaced the bulbs with new ones to eliminate light bulb problems.

PH 8.0
amonia0
nitrate 0
sg 1.025
phosphate .1
cal 350 +

water looks good, clear, brown and green algae starting to form on rock and corals.

We have done 25% PWC every day this week for 3 straight days with water from LFS to eliminate contamination possibility. Had been using RO w/my own salt mixing at home.

Figi leather looks REAL bad, worse than it did after it got here fed ex from the place I bought it a year ago, that's how bad things are.
Inverts ie, snails , crabs are fine, showing no signs of stress-out and eating.

Mushrooms are gone- ric's are almost gone, shriveled and their mouths are open and big. But the ric's were 2-3" , now .5" at best.

candy canes, shriveled with algae growing on them, still colored up but very withdrawn.

Zoa's havent been opened since just after water changed with suspected contaminated water on oct 8th or so.

We have done weekly 20% PWC since the first sign of problems on Oct 8th.

I am thinking of doing a 100% water change with the same water we have been doing the 20% PWC's for the past 3 days with , figure the water would be pretty close matched at this point with he tank water. It seems that the tank is crashing quickly and this is the logical thing to do. What do you think about this ?

[Blueiz]

Im not a saltie, but, have you tried running carbon in your filter?

[joeyfromlawrenceville]

Sea gel has been in for 2 weeks and I put carbon in today.

[gzeiger]

It sounds like it can't hurt more than what's already going on. Some things to think about:

- while chemistry is probably close enough to get away with this, you need to be very careful of temperature since this will already be a stressful event.

- corals are not really built to handle life out of water, even very temporarily. Besides respiration, some of the soft ones may not even be sufficiently self-supporting to handle the loss of buoyancy. I would suggest that to the extent possible you should try to move corals into bowls or a bucket while draining and filling the tank to really minimize the time they are out of water.

[melosu58]

I would not do a 100% PWC. Try doing a 50% PWC every other day and Definitely stay with the GAC.

[joeyfromlawrenceville]

Ok ,
We will do a 50% tonight, the tank looks a bit better than it did 2 hours ago when we left to go to the LFS for water. Thanks for the replies, the huge amount of activated carbon in the panty hose we put in with the korilla blowing water around it may be helping. I will leave the liter size stocking of carbon in for a few more days, then replace with new.
We plan on getting the temps within 3-4 degrees prior to doing the PWC.

Thanks a million,

I'll keep y'all posted ( a southern thang)
Joey

[gzeiger]

If things are looking better I would be a lot less tempted to do something drastic. 3-4 degrees difference seems like kind of a lot to me for such a high volume water change. Not that I don't sometimes exceed that, but if the tank is already heavily stressed I'd try to do better than that if possible, and if not I'd add the new water very slowly.

[joeyfromlawrenceville]

I've done a 5 gal change this afternoon. The water temp isn't going to be as hard to reach as I thought. I'm going to pwc of 10 gal and hope for the best. At this rate I can't hurt anything. BTW, what temp do ya'll recommend? In the a.m. the tank is 78 reaches 83 at night. My wife thinks it's too high.