Yeah, life's been busy. 1 day in May that I wasn't working or traveling.
A myriad of tank issues:
1) impeller issue with my skimmer, required a pricey slow arriving order from bubble king
2) calcium reactor issues, no support from deltec so it was a figure it out yourself thing. more on that...
3) have some fish in qt that died in a system crash (at the retailer, but still sucks).
So, last night after having a little time to stop and think through things, I decided to investigate the alk surge more carefully. In retrospect, I should have done this on sunday but I didn't. I had wondered why by ca/mg hadn't gone up a tone with the alk and why my ph was relatively unaffected. I had assumed that when I was purging the calcium reactor of air (per the manual), I had accidently dosed the effluent into the system and caused the alk surge. However, alk with everything off wasn't coming down like I would have expected. So last night I got out my hanna meter and ran alk with both a current reagent as well as an old reagent. 4.2 and 5 respectively, rather then 12. Alarm bells finally went off. Thanks to @Abe who is a fantastic local wamas reefer and was incredibly generous to test my water with his trident, I confirmed that the alk was below what the trident would test, which we believe is 6. So, Murphy's law beats Occams' razor. I may have overdosed the system but the trident alk also looks to have failed at the same time, so my fix of shutting down things likely dropped the alk too low.
I've got a few acros that have died and/or started to stn. So super fun stuff. I dosed a little carbonate last night at about 11 before getting to sleep and hooked my kalk back up. Still need to figure out what happened with the trident and also make sure that I'm on the right track, though I imagine I'll suffer consequences regardless of if I right the ship at this point.