Started using fauna marin Ultra LPS food. Wow. Corals love it. Chalice, acan, plate, brain, birds nest acro, all go crazy. One acro and birds nest release mesenthial filaments to feed. Dented Brain is releasing huge sweeper tables for some reason.
Switched to Tropic Marin Salt mix today and performed a large water change. Testing topic marin fresh made salt water. 440 calcium 14.5dKH PH 8.2 Magnesium 1220
Corals seem happier now. They did NOT like seachem at all. Have to toss sea chem salt. Too dangerous to use. Unsure why corals reacted negatively to it.
Diatom bloom after starting to use gravel vac to clean top level of substrate. Guess it's released some nutrients. Or the issues with the RO/DI causes this (no DI resin on water used).
Corals starting to look really nice and I believe I'm seeing some growth on the stony corals. Definitely seeing it on zoanthids and soft corals. Feels like I got the balling method calcium dosing locked in. Only 4ppm variation between yesterday's calcium reading. And that could simply be the variation in the accuracy of test itself. Questioning if UV really is worth running on a marine tank if you keep your nutrients low there is no bad algae spores to kill. Theoretically. And not killing good bacteria.
Raised PH to fight algae a little as well as temp to 83F to fuel more rapid coral grown per book "Aquarium Corals, selection, husbandry and natural history" - Borneman. Warmer water raises the metabolism of everything.
This make sense to me as corals in my Nano that was HOT (84-85F) all the time grew quite rapidly. While when in 90g at 76F grow extremely slowly.
Bought a heater (Eheim 200w) and set to 83F. Chiller set to 83F as well but will kick on at 84F. Borneman states 85F is the upper limit.