Water Quality Problems!

[kaia]

I have an 80gal. reef tank that has been set up for eight months. I have a 30 gal sump/refugium, skimmer, and 100lbs. of live rock. I have various soft corals with frogspawn, hammer coral, and torch coral being the only stony corals. I feed them cyclops or bioplankton once every three days or so. For fish I have a maroon clown, midas blenny, two purple firefish, sunburst anthias, tiger goby, fiery wrasse, and three small green cromis. I feed them once a day a cube of mysis shrimp or a cube mix of home made raw shrimp, oysters, and clams. I drip a gallon of Kalkwasser about once every other week (my calcium has always been a little high) I also add iodine, strotium/molybeum, and trace elements once every three weeks and do a 35% water change once a month. Up until about two weeks ago my readings have always been good except for my nitrates and calcium. My readings now are
Nitrite: 0
Ammonia: 0
Nitrate: 50
PH: 8.67 (use a pin-point PH monitor that was properly calibrated)
Alkalinity: off the chart
Calcium: 490-500
Phosphate: 0.1
So obviously my alkalinity and PH are way out of whack and my calcium and nitrates are high. I know I need to do some water changes to help bring down the readings, but what could have caused the alkalinity and PH to jump so high? Other than more water changes what do I need to do different?

 

[thegrog]

I don't know how often you test, but sounds like you were adding too much Kalkwasser. With only those corals, you don't really need a kalk drip. Do you test both pH and Ca before every drip? If not, you may have added too much.
Also, there really is no need to add trace elements if you are doing regular water changes.
Also, 35% monthly changes is not the way to go. 10-15% every 10-14 days will give your system more stability with 10% weekly being ideal. With such a large change, you can swing your system wildly.
I would quit all the additives and start doing 10% changes every 5-7 days for a few weeks to get your system back on track.

 

[kaia]

Grogg, thanks for the input and I will definitely be doing more smaller water changes than one big one. I hope that will work.