I am fairly new and need help! 60gal

Hello and thanks for your time!

I recently fell into the marine aquarium hobby and since I have started I have done nothing but electrocute myself, kill undeserving snails, fish and shrimp, and have been overall having a horrible time. Well, it has been 3 months now since I got a 60 gal tank with a damsel and tomato clown and I began some intense research. I quickly bought 60 lbs of live rock which was "pre-cured" but I also cured it for about 2 weeks (not in main tank). I bought 50-60 lbs live sand. My equipment is as follows: ASM C-3 protein skimmer, lighting fixture has 2 MH @ 250 walls and 2 PC's one actinic and the other 10k, 30 gal sum (contains heater, live sand, and filter media however I was running ceramics, and carbon which I have been removing slowly with 10% water changes it is now gone), RODI, 5 gal refuge which contains live sand and a few live rocks (currently I use it to house my new admittance to my tank. Just so I can observe them kind of like a quarantine that is plumed into my tank), mag 9.5, and a DIY auto top off that holds RODI water and keeps the sump topped off. OK, now that you have some idea of the equipment I am running let me tell you my current water parameters:
salinity: 1.023 (hydrometer, have currently ordered a refractor)
PH: 8.3 -8.4
ammonia: .05 -.1 ppm
phosphate: .1-.2
nitrite: 0
Nitrate: 0
ALK: normal (Red sea testing kit, hate it would love a suggestion)
Calcium: 350 ( I have been trying to raise it slowly and will get it back up to 450)
Temp: 74 @ night 76 under halides

My lightening is run by a timer I have the halides on from 10am to 3pm and the PC's run from 8am until 8 PM and then LED's come on (moonlights). I recently bought 8 snails and they all flipped over and died eventually (probably do to my dripping which was horrible or maybe my water prams), I currently have 2 skunk shrimp, 1 tomato clown, 3 emerald crabs, 1 coral branded shrimp (which has gone MIA in the past few days and I have seen what looks like a claw and a few antenna my guess either molting or dead), 1 damsel, a few hermits, a wrasse, and.... an anemone (i know :-/). I am currently trying to save my anemone because I know that if every thing has been doing so poorly that it is sure to die (I know how hard they are to keep) its been in my tank for 2-3 weeks (looks ok but has recently been worrying me due to the fact that it has moved and in its current location it has kind of tipped over. Its color is still good and it is full size but I think its mouth might be a little open. I am keeping a close eye on it. I really don’t have a cleaner crew mainly because I am afraid to put any more snails in because they seem to die off quickly. I have been doing 10% water changes every week and if my ammonia spikes up a little I will do a 10-25 % change. All my live rock is doing well and my fish seem ok but my inverts are just not making it. Any advice? :-/ I test my water frequently and try to make the correct adjustments. I try not to use chems such as prime but have used it on occasion when something has died and I need to get ammonia levels down quickly. I add elements, calcium, iodide and strontium as directed by Kent. I monitor calcium levels myself and add accordingly but with the others I just add as directed. I feed my fish a mixture of frozen, flake, dried, pellet, and seaweed.
lost so far (1 emerald crab, 8 turbo/mexican snails, braded coral shrim is a question, and sadly a butterfly fish):disappoin

 

I got it from craigs list

I am not sure if copper was ever used but when i got the tank i cleaned it out pretty well. But i did use a medication to treat the butterfly fish early on it was a rid-ich thing ( waste of money and time) but it was "organic" and did not contain copper. It said it was ok for reef and inverts. I did that weeks and weeks ago before i had any inverts in there except one hermit. The hermits and the fish have lived though allot and continue to do well it seems.

 

hi i ve just been skimming the the post, but i did notice your temperature is low, unless its a coldwater tank you want to run your temp at 78 degrees

 

On the 8 snails you bought did they die within a day or so or was it over the coarse of weeks?

When you dripped acclimated them did you acclimate for temp after as well, dripping is great for acclimating water conditions but the water usually cools since dripping takes so long, so I also float them after for a while to get the water back up to the right temp.

Have you added anything recently to account for the high ammonia, that could have started another cycle?

You may want to bring the anemone back to the pet store or give to a friend for a while. Even though it may look good now things can happen fast. I recently had one hit a power head and luckily I was there to remove it within minutes of it happening or I could have run into some serious trouble. (Even after removing it my tank was cloudy for 5 days, luckily no other fatalities) Even though I loved my bta I won't get another, there are plenty of other corals that have long tentacles that are easier to keep and more importantly don't have the ability to move around the tank and cause havoc.

Good Luck

 

response

1 snail died 3 days after then 2 more a day after that and then the last one died about 2 weeks after. I used to run my temp at 78 but under the halides during the day it would go up to 83 -84 so i decided to run the water temp a little cooler so during the day it wouldn't heat up so much. I figured 74 was pretty good because that would allow it to go up to 78 during the day.

 

As for the temp issue, you may want to try using a small fan running across the tank to lower the temp to keep it at 78. Just run the fan on a timer to match the time your mh are on during the day. You can get a clip on fan at Wallyworld for under $10, you'll evaporate water faster than normal but it helps lower the temp in my tank by up to 5 degrees while my mh are on. You can also try raising up the lights a bit.

As for the snails, do you have anything else in your tank that may prey on snails. Thats pretty quick for them to go, or maybe you just got some that were already not in good condition.

Do you have any pics of your tank we could see?

 

Hermit's will kill snails to get their shells, not sure if that's whats happening or not but I see it in my tank all the time.

 

snails

No I don't think the snails are being affected by my other inhabitance. I say this because the snails where falling on to their backs and refused to move. I think it was water conditions or failure to drip properly. The snails would live a long time upside down I would place them back over and they would flip them selves in the same place moments later. Eventually I took them out of the main tank and into a hospital tank to avoid any ammonia spikes and that is where they all ended up dying. As for the fans on the MH's I have 2 little fans running with them but is it really that bad to have the water at 74? Other places state that the temp should be between 72-78 so I figured 78 was the top end.

 

Pics

Here are a few pics of my set up. I do not have any of the tank because it is late and I do not want to turn on the lights and stress the fish (probably me being paranoid) Here are some of my sump, refuge, and rodi/autotopoff