Where to begin . . .

There's so much to share I honestly don't know where to begin.  I've made a ton of changes, trimmed back hugely, removed two entire colonies, and most importantly for this post, struggled with excessive calcium carbonate buildup.  Suffice to say I'm trying to figure out why I put a newly cleaned pump into service in November and it seized up in April.  At the moment I'm trying to figure out if pH swings due to dosing B-Ionic are the cause.  My methodology is simply to stop dosing for a while and up the calcium reactor to see if that stops the buildup then assuming that doesn't stop the buildup I'll shut off the calcium reactor and see if the removal of CO2 makes the difference then if that doesn't work I'll try something else.  Fact: I'm growing Calciium Carbonate too fast.  Answer I have no idea . . . . 


Corals:  Strange lessons . . . I gave Jason back a large colony of Tyree Purple Monster and oddly enough he's getting the same white band problem he had before starting at the base and progressing very slowly.  Pathogen in his tank?  Excessive flow?  No idea but interesting . . .  Along the same lines we both have been struggling to get Ice Fire Echinata to grow.  I bought two frags from Vivid Aq. in CA and they died.  Bought a colony from Jason.   It died.  Jason had several in the store and one colored up dramatically in his SPS sale tank while the one in his display wiped.  Then he moved the one in his SPS sale tank to his display and it started to slowly wipe at the base.  So assuming the worst I convinced him to give the piece to me and I broke it into several pieces, dipped it in Revive, and have put the pieces in various places in my system.  So far all the pieces are surviving, but we'll see.

My big "Bugga a Boo" right now is pH.  It's driving me mad that I can't control the pH, but the nightly increase in CO2 is overwhelming.  I'd really like to know how much night algae growth in a refugium on a reverse cycle I would need to completely overcome the cycle,  working . . . . standby . . . someday we'll know.