Too Soon To Have Put A Monti

HI all,

I set up my 35 cube back in end of October and had it cycling. In mid December, I got my first fish (firefish) and in end of January my first three softies (gsp, mushroom, sympodium). Then last weekend I got my first piece of purple Monti. It's been about 4 days and the MontI looks to be getting browner. Was it too soon to put it in? I had an algae bloom as with every new tank, and the algae is still on some rocks but not growing much. I scrape it off but I can't seem to always get it completely off. Some fluffs here and there.

Details of my tank:
-35 cube with 20H sump, sump filled halfway
-AI prime hd light
-Started with about 3 lbs of LR and 20lbs of dry rock
-One firefish and two scarlet hermit crabs
-jebao sw2 and jebao SW4 powerheads giving total of maybe 400-500gph
-return pump gives something like 100-150gph based on my estimate
-temperature 78F
-salinity 1.025 or 1.026
-pH swings between 7.75 and 7.9 depending in time of day
-cal 430
-alk 8.4
-mag 1400

The MontI is set about halfway up the tank, so 9-10" below water surface. Not getting directly flow as the two powerheads are right above it.

 

Some quick pics of my tank

 

 

Not necessarily... A browning SPS coral is usually indicative of too high of nitrates. What are your nitrates currently?

I would work on getting your PH higher too. I would suggest setting up a kalkwasser mixed with freshwater drip to help get your pH up.

 

+1 on correcting the PH.

I recommend starting with Aquavitro Salinity or Seachem Vibrant Sea; Salinity is Vibrant Sea which has been batch-tested and has guaranteed analysis of the micronutrients and is super dry - Vibrant Sea is the same stuff, though it's not super dry and the micronutrients aren't batch tested, meaning there may be a small variation between lots - not enough to worry about unless you're doing insanely difficult SPS..

That stuff comes buffered, in the pail, to a PH minimum of 8.4 and a maximum of 8.6; I've consistently measured a PH of 8.4 with my Red Sea titration kits.

 

How slow do you think should I bring up the pH? If it's around 7.8 on average, should I bring slowly bringing it up to 8.4 over a week? A month? Two months?

 

Also, I use red Sea coral pro. When I make a new batch, the pH is usually 8.2-8.4. I think what happened was when I first filled the tank, I had a lot of precipitate because I must have done something wrong. Do you think that I could do one large wc (25-30%) and see if the pH goes up to 8? Would it be safe to do a jump that big in 10-15mins?

 

Doing the large water change is a good idea; I would be surprised if you ran into any issues as a result of the large water change.

Maintaining PH by water changes only is incredibly difficult at best to impossible at worst. Corals/algae help buffer the PH during the day, but if you have a PH probe, you will see PH drop a decent amount at night when the lights are off. And CO2 affects PH significantly (ocean acidification any one?). We got to enjoy a micro experiment showing this.. We replaced all the old, drafty windows in our house with modern, air-tight ones. The PH in all our saltwater tanks plummeted! So now even in the dead of winter, the outside door has to be cracked to let fresh air in...

My husband mixes kalkwasser in the auto top off bins, and uses alkalinity solution to keep the PH at least 8.1 in our SPS tank. Reef Buffer works too, but you will have to determine how often you will need to add it based on your tank's water tests. Using Reef Buffer is going to be a lot cheaper too than if you were using water changes to maintain PH.