What am i doing wrong?!

75 gallon tank
- 1 maroon clown
- 1 damsel fish
- 9 or so hermit crabs (small)
- 1 banded shrimp
- 1 polyp of hammer coral
- 3 polyps of trumpet coral

not very much live rock, gravel substrate,

lighting = 2x T5 36 watt, one actinic, and one all spectrum (both coralife)

filtration
- canister filter (for biological filtration)
- 5 gallon refugium (made out of 20 gallon tank) with 5 inch sand bed, cheato, 600 or so gph return pump
- protein skimmer


problem: Long tentacle anemone died after only a week, hair algae problem, corals look unhealthy, substrate looks filthy

the aquarium has been up and running for like 5 years, the refugium was recently added, i always use RO water, and the nitrate, ammonia, pH, temp, salinity, and nitrite are all within reef limitsi have no idea what is going wrong but everything looks strained

i know thats a lot of info but i seriously need help!

 

Welcome to 3reef.

My suggestion is add more rock and get rid of the canister. The deep sand bed you have in the sump as well as the existing live rock should be your biological filter.

Your lighting sounds like you need an upgrade to a larger and better fixture for a 75 gallon tank.

You listed parameter for a fish only tank and not those need for a reef with sensitive inverts, Calcium, Alkalinity and Magnesium. What SG are you keeping the tank at?

 

Is the gravel 5 years old too?

 

+1 on everything
+2 on more live rock.
Also what is this gravel? marine tanks should have sand substrate. gravel seems more fw to me. but im not sure that is the issue.

 

Anemones need a LOT OF LIGHT. 2 36 watt lights in a 75g tank is barely enough to keep zoas alive, let alone an anemone. That's one reason why it didn't make it.

You say you are using RO water, but is it 0 TDS RO/DI water? If not, you most likely have phosphate issues and that will cause hair algae problems as well as dirty substrate and unhealthy looking corals.

Without about 75 lbs of live rock, you will also have problems as the live rock is responsible for converting ammonia to nitrite and nitrite to nitrate. You say they are within reef limits, but the only acceptable limit is zero (for ammonia and nitrite) and less than 10ppm for nitrate. Anything higher than that and the corals will suffer.

Hope this helped.

 

+1 on all the above. if you were to use the canister filter you would have to clean it and maintain it once a week, otherwise it is oxygen poor and holds bad stuff easily. the gravel it sounds like you have kind of worries me. you will get a nice clean look with sand, but change that out slowly(over a few weeks) if you were going to. You definitely need a better light for most corals, as you may have the right spectrum, but it is not powerful enough for support of corals or anemones. The RO system you use isn't getting out the metals and chemicals that an RO/DI unit will. That is what is most likely causing your algae bloom. Sorry if any of this is confusing, but i wish you luck on your reef adventure ;D

 

yes, the gravel is 5 years old as well, however i recently cleaned it... however seeing as there are more problems with my tank, should this be the least of my problems?

I have been keeping the SG at a steady 1.025

i also ordered a better testing kit that will allow me to test magnesium, phosphate,calcium, and dhk along with the 4 that i stated

(i haven't been able to detect any ammonia, nitrite, my pH is around 8.5, and my nitrites hover in the 5-15ppm range)

also i was planning on getting this light fixture along with what i have eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices how does that look?


and thanks everybody for the help! i'm new to 3reef but love it already!

 

Thats scary. all that stuff the sand collected over the 5 years probably leached into the system... unless you did it out of the tank..

And that fixture all though inciting, id stay away... reason being. 1 theres no fluorescent light with it. Those give u the option to add actinics to the tank. Also i dont trust ebay fixtures. they more than likely dont stand behind the product (warranty) id safe up a litttttle more dough and get a solid 4 bulb, or 6 t5ho fixture. i plan on getting one on my 75, if i dont do LEDs.

 

hooo-yeah... kinda scares me as well. id recommend a somewhat large water change. isn't the ph a little high? i thought it was supposed to be around 8.2, but I'm not so sure...

 

Gravel (I'm assuming it's crushed coral?) will hold lots of bad gunk. If it's shallow and you don't vacuum it regularly that could cause issues. It could also cause issues if it's deep and you vacuumed it the first time after 5 years. I wouldn't vacuum it at all if it's deep. However, it sounds to me from your post that everything started to look bad after the anemone died? Did you remove the anemone promptly and run any carbon after it died? I agree on the anemone needing a LOT of light.

5 to 15 nitrates actually is not too bad, ours is consistently higher than that but we have a soft coral tank with a few LPS and a couple of encrusting SPS corals (no nuisance algae) and they're all thriving, so I have to disagree on the corals suffering above 10 ppm. Could we get better growth from the SPS with lower nitrates? I'm sure we could, but they're not suffering, they're growing pretty quickly.

Also, your system could just be adjusting because of the addition of the refugium. Maybe run some carbon and give it some time while keeping an eye on things.