melev

Checking on an acropora in the reef today, I saw new white areas of damage on a coral that has never suffered once. Since I thought I'd resolved the alkalinity situation earlier this week, that meant two things: 1) I'm not done with areas of loss, and 2) I hadn't found the solution yet. The anemones still aren't their normal happy selves, and the SPS losses are discouraging. I should just fill the tank with leathers and mushrooms and call it a day.

Every day this week my skimmer has been pulling out a ton of skimmate, and the color wasn't right. It should be darker, and less watery. Frankly, it's hard to believe that much funk was in the water, yet day after day I'd dump it out and it would amass more overnight.

Looking everything over, the one red flag area was the biopellet reactor. The media wasn't tumbling as it should, and even opening the 1" valve wide open didn't correct it. A few days ago, I'd unscrewed the lid of the biopellet reactor, removed the top plate and cleaned it thoroughly to assure proper flow passed through the vents. It wasn't bad at all, but I did it just in case. The fluid inside the reactor looked a little cloudy, not the normal clear water I've always experienced in 3.5 years of running these. The skimmate's color was almost an orange color... My guess is that skimmate contains rotting biopellet byproduct, due to the lack of sufficient flow. Lower oxygen often yields sulfuric conditions. The biopellet's effluent is pumped directly into the skimmer pump's intake, so as fast as it was pouring out of the reactor, the skimmer was capturing the majority of it and exporting it from the system. Some livestock was more sensitive to this, I'm assuming.

Closing off the feed valve, I removed the reactor and took it to the sink. My educated guess is that the injector section of the reactor was plugged up, so I poured all the media out into a large bowl, and then took everything apart to clean it. Happy Saturday to me.

As expected, the groves were full of packed media, and the smaller holes that spurt out water were obstructed.

When I first tried running tap water through it, hardly any came out. Of course when I tried to take a picture, it appears like it's working okay. It wasn't, don't let this picture fool you. There should be 16-20 jets of water coming out. I see 6 in this image.

Being the King of Backups has its perks, and instead of toiling away on the reactor I decided to get my clean spare NextReef reactor online. I filled it up with the used media, after it was rinsed with some tank water for a few times. The flow through the media is much better. Water parameters are dead on, so I'm hoping this removed a source of "poison" from the system. I still plan to pull the refugium offline in the next month to replace all the dirty sand with clean sand, and spruce it all up. It's been left as is for 3.5 years, and it's time.

Hopefully this is the conclusion to the recent turmoil in the reef. All I want are happy colorful corals, after all. Is that too much to ask for?