help with favia brain coral

[kgarcia0311]

Hi I am new to reef keeping but not to marine hobby been doing it for over 4 yrs now. anyway about 6 months ago I bought a favia brain coral that was doing very well, but about 2 months ago I got lazy and fell into some bad husbandry techniques now the coral has a brown spot covering half its body, is there anything I can do to make it healthy again. I have a 72 gallon bow with 80lbs live rock and 4 1/2 watts per gallon of light using t5's. my ammonia is 0, nitrite 0, nitrate 5, ph 8.3 and calcium 400ppm.

[Twitterbait]

for starters blow all the brown crap off the skeleton. the coral can't grow back over if the skeleton isn't clean. then give it moderate flow and light. where is it sitting right now?

[kgarcia0311]

Its sitting toward the the high end of the tank

[Twitterbait]

drop it down in the tank then. damaged brains actually prefer less light.

[kgarcia0311]

should I place it on the sand bed

[Twitterbait]

that will be fine. you may even look for a nice dark corner in the tank where you can place it for a bit. the darkness will kill any algae and help it to recover.