Cloudy days

[ReeferMan]

So i get a call while sitting in God awefull traffic last night saying that my tank was milky. I panic of course and call Chip for advise on what it might be. Get home to find my kalk reacor had dumped in 5g of kalk water in my sump. Float switch must of got stuck but lucky i had it set on a timer so it couldn't go on for more than 5 min so it stopped it there (I also found out the timer for the stirrer in the reactor was set too close to the ATO kick on time-also just recharged my kalk). The whole tank was white with a chalky film all over the rocks, glass and powerheads. Tested Alk 10.5, ph dropped to 8.17 by 8pm. Cleaned out skimmer and started to run really wet, blew off rocks, cleaned glass and siphoned 15g of water to get the calky residue off the bottom of the tank and i cleaned out sock filter to catch anything floating. this morning took a look at everything was back to normal except so far i lost a purple acro colony and green tenius colony. Also have alittle bleaching on so others (hope it stops here). Man this sucks! I think the main reason for this wasnt the kalk but the sudden drop in salinity from 1.026 to 1.023. Time will only tell what will be lost. I plan to siphon chalky stuff off the bottom today as well. I tried to see if i could make the topoff do it again and of course it worked as normal and shut off. Guess its back to the dosing pump. Sometimes i hate this hobby, all your hard work and money can be gone in one day.

[zoozilla]

Sorry to hear that. I lost everything in my tank not too long ago due to a Kalk mishap :( Hope your tank has a quick recovery.

Edited October 25, 2007 by zoozilla

[flowerseller]

I think you lost the colony's because you offered me a buck for a $200.00 pump.

 

FYI for anyone in the future,

Do not react hastily to a situation like this, exchanging water during and event like this will likely cause you more harm than good. Unless you do a total one time exchange of ALL water, including sump or anything hooked up to this system.

 

Wait it out,

and then siphon off only enough water to remove residue (fall out)

[gastone]

Chris, I think I about flipped the first time I had a precipitation event like this. It has since happened again (more than once). In the end it isn't a big deal. Check out this article:

 

http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2005-07/rhf/index.php

 

I'm sure Chip will agree with everything that Dr. Randy Holmes Farley says.

 

Garrett.

[ReeferMan]

 

Would everyone agree that the bleaching is due to the fast salinty drop?

[BeltwayBandit]

"Would everyone agree that the bleaching is due to the fast salinty drop?"

 

Its hard to say. I would say the combination of rapid changes in salinity, pH, DKH, etc. all contributed to the loss. The last time I had a kalk storm in my tank I just took the CO2 bottle off of my calcium reactor and blew shots of CO2 directly into the skimmer to keep the PH from spiking too high. Then I just left everything alone and let the cloudiness settle out on its own.

 

BB

[ReeferMan]

:( Alot of bleaching