HELP! Everything Dying!

[PsychoKnight]

Didn't mention your method for knowing when to change RO membrane or DI resin. A broken membrane is as usless as no membrane, and saturated resin will release everything its been binding, all at once.

Wont know unless you test with TDS meter (total dissolved solids), $20-30 on the net, Hanna is a big name. Should read 0ppm on a properly functioning DI output. You should also test just the RO output to see if ithe prob is w/ the membrane, or resin, or both. TDS with RO before DI should be less than 10 with good household pressure, maybe 15 on a low pressure municipal feed. Many people report RO numbers as low as 3 or 5ppm before DI.

[Rosemarie]

When I cleaned the equipment I used no soap, no chemicals, just water and a toothbrush. We only use windex on the outside of the tank to clean the glass but we'e careful not to get anything in the tank. The razor blades, theyre in there and inaccessible. Our lights are the corallife with the 3 different lights, high intensity. There is one bulb out for the nightlight but otherwise works fine.

We did shut off the jets yesterday to see if its the power and replaced the heater as well. I'll be picking up a multimeter today.

Thanks everyone for all your help!

[Break122704]

Good Luck, Hopefullr THe RC was able to help

[skylab1]

Rosemarie,

By any chance, anyone smoke in your household?

[skippysmind]

have you used a new bag of salt? I have heard of people getting bad salt. never experienced it, but there is threads on RC about it.
you might want to do a search on salt.

[Rosemarie]

Skylab, yes it is in a room that smoke but we have a window open and an air filter running 24hrs a day. Right now everything is dead so we might just start over again.

[marinegirl]

Another fact, two razor blades were dropped in the tank about 8 months ago, would that be causing this now? ??????

Are they still in there !!!!

[bertoni]

I'm sorry to hear everything's gone. How bizarre!

I wouldn't worry too much about the razor blades. The chemistry forum has discussions on this, IIRC.

[skylab1]

Before you restart the tank listen to me. I hate to say it, but it looks like SECOND HAND SMOKE kill your tank.

Most people don’t realize that nicotine is deadly to fish, invert and corals. The smoke coming out of the cigarette contain nicotine, people who smoke have nicotine on their hand. When you smoke in a room with a fish tank the smoke will eventually get in contact with the water, or you clean your tank with a bare hand. The nicotine will transfer to the water, it may not kill the fish right away, but sooner or later, the quantity of nicotine will become lethal and the fish will start to die one by one. There are no test kit I know of to test for nicotine in the water; you have to get a sample of the water to a certified lab to test it.

Clean and wash your hand won’t do it; if you smoke on a daily basis nicotine will be on your hands, your arms and cloths. It take 3 month to get the nicotine out of your system after you stop smoking. The nicotine is in your blood stream, when you sweat it come out on your hand and arms, now you put your hand and arms in the tank water, where do you think the nicotine end up? Ware a really long glove when you work inside the tank. Make sure your glove is not contaminated with nicotine or other deadly chemical. And don’t smoke in the same room where the tank is, go outside and smoke. The air filter you used is useless when it come to nicotine, the only filter that will take out nicotine is an Ozone filter, but ozone filter will also kill the fish; so don’t smoke around the tank.

Since every thing already dead then you can do 100% water change and use carbon to get rid of the any nicotine that may still be present. I don’t mean one little bag of chem pure for a few days that’s useless. You’ll need 9 lb of lab grade tri-base carbon for a 55 gallon tank. The tri-base carbon will have to be in a canister filter so that water can flow through it. The tri-base carbon will serve as the main filter for your tank from now on as bacteria will colonize the carbon and form a large biological filter. This won’t happened over night, it will take a while to get rid the nicotine. If you don’t believe me then please call Bill at HDL, Bill is Marine Biologist and a bio-chemist, he can tell you how to solve your problem, his number is 562-428-9973. Your LFS can’t help you, people on reef central can’t help you either, most of them don’t believe this anyway. Good luck.

[skippysmind]

skylab1, i take it you don't like smoking. lol

[Rosemarie]

Very interesting, I'll see if I can find a lab in the area just out of curiosity. At this point we're going to get a new tank altogether and start from scratch I think. If I'm understanding right, the carbon will take out the nicotine from the rocks? If I do a 100% water change then all that would be left is the live rock and the sand unless we replace the live sand. My guess is the water RODI filter is the culprit, just a guess. Either way we want to know what happened to avoid it in the future, this hobby is way too expensive to not do the right thing.