saltysweet1
New member
Ok so here is the story , I have a five gallon pico reef set up that has been doing really well and is almost a year old. I have a small clown fish that is hosting a pulsing xenia that I had to move from my 28 gallon.well the rock the xenia is on started to grow some fair algae on it and the clown won't let anything near his home to clean it up. Not only is the hair algae growing he spread out the xenia all the way to the edge of the rocks. There is even some growing on a old hermit shell next to it now. Well i got him a small green bta in hopes he will host it. Well the bta was doing great. It found his spot with out me having to move any corals. Well yesterday i was doing my weekly water change taking extra time and adding the new water very slowly. While doing I noticed the dimmer on my white leds was only up 1/4 of the way . Well at this time when i was changeing the water only my evening lights were on not the whites . Me seeing were the blues were I turned it up thinking it was way to low and didn't think any thing of it. Before I went to sleep and the night lights were on all my corals were open and happy even my bta was all fat and puffed up nicely. Well i woke up this morning to my bta all shriveled up ozing stuff out my shrimp was trying to eat. And then noticed the white leds were up way to high. Was this the bta purging because the higher amount of light? I then turned them down and went to work worried he might die and kill my little reef. Well i came home tonight to find my bta in a different spot open but not as big as the days before. Should I increase the lights a little to help him to deal with the loss or see if he recovers fully. My lights I have are well thought out and some would call over kill but in a modular design I can add or change at any time. I have 12 cree xte royal blues with a mix of 60 and 80 degree lenses with the 80s more near the center and mid tank. I have12 cree r5's cool whites with the same mix of lenes. I run the drivers at 350 ma and as you heard only a 1/4 to 3/4 of the dimmer control at the amperage. And i have two 3 watt blue and two 3watt violet/uv leds. Though soon might add a red and the higher mm blue. And the sad thing is I had the lights tuned perfect . I had some orange ham ban zoos growing like crazy. I had four polyups four weeks ago to the day. I now have 14. I don't even want to tell you what else I have been growing in a fast rate LOL. What ever is in there just grows fast.even now my bta looks smaller then last night at the same time. I even dropped a little food in the tank and didn't get a feeding response like in other days. Did my stupid over engineering kill my poor animal or is there hope.
