I had the fish for something like 6 months.  Three days ago he stopped eating, two days ago he stopped swimming and just sat on the bottom next to a rock and yesterday the snails and shrimp made a "standing room only" buffet out of him.  I have not received my test kits yet, I hope they come soon. 

Rocky709, I am taking your advice on the live rock.  I had 40 pounds in my 29 gallon tank but didn't get any more when I moved to the 65 gallon tank.  I got another 40 pounds of Carib-Sea reef bones today (some really nice looking peices) and put it in my 20 gallon tank with about 5 pounds of live rock and 20 pounds of live sand.  I am going to treat it daily with Marc Weiss Bacter Vital and hope that it is ready for the main tank in two or three weeks.  I guess we will see.  Anyone know how I should handle the lighting while I am curing/seeding it?  There is nothing currently in the tank but about 40 small snails so I a keeping the light on 24/7.

How long did you have the fish in the tank? There could be many different reasons for the loss of your fish, with stress and disease being the most plausible. Do you have that test kit yet? If any of your water parameters are off that could also have led to the death of your fish. Also with adding B-Ionic you have to remember that this can affect the pH in your tank so its a good idea to monitor your pH while adding alk/calk. Looking at the picture of your tank I am wondering if you have enough filtration to handle the bio load you have in your tank...I believe you need to get some more live rock in there.

ryanj,
Thanks for the heads up on the lights, I put the 250 on tonight and WOW!!, it's like the tank wasn't even lit before.  I turned it off and it was like the tank was in a dimly lit room.  I set my timer to run it for the full 11 hours my PC were running, bu I'll start at say 4 hours and work it up. 

On the hammer coral, my suspicion is that my alk is WAY too low and that my calcium is also at the bottom the barrel.  My alk is at like 4.7dkh, I have not tested the calcium but since I have never added a suppliment and I RO all my top off water I suspect it is really low too.  Also my salt is really low, I have been adding top off water with an extra high concentration of salt to bring it back up.  Tonight I just started adding B-Ionic 2 part system for alk and calcium as well as Inland Seas Trace minerals suppliment. 

Aside from Ammonia, Nitrate, and Nitrite I haven't really tested anything on this tank, so once I realized my alk and gravity were so low I ordered a bunch of Salifert test kits and an electronic gravity tester.  Hopefully they arrive in the next couple days so I can make sure everything else is in line. 

Jbera,

If you get that 250W MH, I would say you are good to go as far as lighting goes.  You should be able to keep any coral under that.  As for your hammer and it "eroding" that may not be due to your lack of light, because it should be okay under those power compacts.  How long have you had that hammer.  On both of my hammer and frogspawn when I bought them, they both kind of died off a bit but then once they acclimated to the tank, they took off.  Be careful when you put that new light on to acclimate you corals to it.  It will be much brighter than what you have now.  Just slowly up the hours you run your lights over the next week or two.

Ryan

tileman wrote: If you ever want to come over and look at my 65g setup, you are more than welcome to. I have a few different types of corals that I could show you.

Take him up on this! Brad has one of the most GORGEOUS tanks I have ever seen. This is a MUST SEE.