Tank Parameters all over the place

[spuri87]

so much great information.. So good to see some real positive results from water changes, definitely gives me confidence to spend time, money and energy doing them on a weekly basis for few months until things become stable!

If you want to test whether your rocks leach phosphate. Add a piece of rockscape into a container of fresh saltwater. Let it sit for a day or two and test the phosphate level.

such a great suggestion.. I always love out-of-the-box (literally in this case) ways to do something.. thanks for sharing

This is odd and something was done wrong. It works in 100% of the cases if done correctly.

Not sure how or why lanthanum chloride “didn’t work”

I think it's coz phosphates were leaching from the rocks, something on the lines of above ^^.. Even my LFS was surprised, as the same 'solution' has apparently done wonders for their other clients.

Reef crystals isn’t the same as purple box instant ocean

Yeah sorry, I used IO Purple Box before switching.. may switch back to that as I see some good reviews in one of the comments above

Now I only feed enough so that it is all consumed in less than a minute. I feed mostly frozen food (3.5 cubes per day, rinsed with RODI) and a very very small amount of pellets 1-2 times a day (emphasis on very small amount!). I also feed one nori sheet in a 112g display tank + 30 gallon sump. You certainly need to feed more given your tank size and fish load but it sounds like you are over feeding.

I see a thread by @Alexander1312 on the feeding haha.. It's always subjective and I tried to adopt what I felt was right for the fish whilst practicing Ich Management (UV + vitamins + lot of feeding).. but now that that's under control, I may have to rethink about the feeding strategy.

PH-is that the average, high, or low?

Whenever I measured (mostly during the afternoon 3-4 hours window), it was always in 7.8-8.0 range

I would also add a lot of fast-growing soft coral to soak up nutrients and shade rock/sand

I love this suggestion! thanks for sharing

I use polyfil and I see it gets clogged every 2-3 days.. but I keep them in there for about a week (coz I am a slacker).. Maybe that's also contributing towards the high numbers? How often do people change fish diaper (aka polyfil)? Also, will acting more bacteria (PNSB OR Microbacter OR turbofritz OR good bacteria from other successful tanks (DBTC)) will help in any way with the current situation or they just will probably create more Nitrates coz they will be consuming the Ammonia faster?

 

[MichaelB]

Leaving dirty clogged filter material equal Nitrate factory. In some cases it's better not to use any mechanical filtration if you won't swap them every three days or so.

Same thing for socks or whatever else catches particles. If you wanna be a slacker without that issue get a automated filter roller

Maybe set a phone reminder?

 

[Alexander1312]

@Alexander1312 -technically yes. However, at the time my need for nitrate reduction vs Phosphate reduction was significantly less so went with bacto balance as it a little softer on the nitrates. @spuri87 may indeed be better served by the Elim-NP if he goes that route. Also quite interesting -so I had it stable at 8 NO3 and .3 PO4 but wanted to bring down the Phosphate a bit more for a better N/P ratio. When I added diluted lanth-yanked my nitrate down with it to 1.1 in a week until I interjected sodium nitrate to get it back up. Slowly readjusting the lanth and carbon dosing so I don't need to dose nitrate.

Thats actually the biggest downside of carbon dosing, that it will bring down both but often nitrates faster (relatively speaking since nitrate will always remain higher than PO4), and thats why I chose GFO (over lanthanum) to address PO4 specifically.

Elimi NP is still good in bringing down phosphates but should not be used if your NO3 are already at a lower single digit level. However, as long as NO3 is double digit, using Elimi NP can be quite effective and supplementing water changes.

If nitrate drops too much, supplementing with ammonia dosing vs nitrate dosing is my preference.

I am not in favor of lanthanum as it is too complicated to setup properly, higher risk of precipitation without being skimmed out (and in my case with the ozone usage, there is not an easy install).

 

[Alexander1312]

Salt: I don’t believe there is much difference between the various salt brands other than 1) some salts mix much cleaner than others, and 2) some are more expensive than others. The most common salt amongst the coral farmers and high end SPS vendors is Reef Crystals or Instant Ocean. These also happen to be very economical but also mix dirty due to the use of decaking agents (harmless but an eye sore). I have used Red Sea Coral Pro, Tropic Marine Pro Reef, and Nyos Pure. The TM and Nyos mix very cleanly and quickly, but they are not cheap. The RedSea ProReef works fine but has very high alk and mixes dirty. I mostly use Nyos Pure since I prefer a clean mixing salt and Nyos Pure can be found at same price or cheaper than Tropic Marine if you wait for sales. Nyos also has alk of 8.5 (around the level I keep my tank) whereas Tropic Marine is 7.0.

Sorry had to make a couple of comments on the salt statements you made above, with which I am not fundamentally disagreeing:

I am note sure if the reference about which salts are most often used by professionals are not misleading. Quality Marine, uses Tropic Marin salt unless they changed very recently, Top Self in my opinion also do not only use these type of salts, and prefer higher end salts for their more critical tanks (including Tropic Marin I believe). So maybe there is a ton of basement farmers who use these type of inexpensive salts to manage their cost, including Zoos, so not sure if this an adequate representation of usage by quality vendors. I could be wrong.

But the main point I wanted to make is that all salts use anti caking agents, and there is only one salt on the market that I know of which does not, which is the new Purity salt from the joint venture product of Tropic Marin and Fauna Marin.

Also, Tropic Marin has lower alk because pro farmers often run closer to an ULNS model and want to be better able to manage their alk avoiding higher alk values within a low nutrient environment which s not liked by SPS. I have also started to run my system closer to 7.5 dkh and found SPS doing better.

 

[BAYMAC]

Coral holding at a wholesaler doesn't need high end salt. The corals 99% of the time don't live there more then a few weeks tops.

 

[andyman]

I've been in your situation and your looking at the wrong parameters. First your ph is swings over time. but even with a ph of 8.0 its low. Corals have an easier time when pH are higher (8.1 at nite to 8.4 when the lights are on.) Your po4 are high but not too bad. Heck my po4 are 0.3-0.5 and my corals are growing out of control.

you need to get your water tested and you may need to dose trace elements. Strontium , bromide, etc. I realized my corals realy took off when I started adding trace elements. My po4 and nitrates are also high (in the double digits). I was worried about it due to people offering advice but I didn't really see problems until my no3 was at triple digits. Thats when I realized I had to fix the problem.

I have not changed water in 3 years. Not even 1 percent. All i do is top off. Do yourself a favor, get your water tested for trace elements, and if you think you have pathegons do a aqua biome test. Do those 2 test first before seeking advice. Nobody here will be able to help you because no body knows your tank better then yourself. I wouldn't even follow my advice above without an ICP test for trace elements. I personally use ICP-MS from reef moonshiners and have had great success. My only problem now is keeping the corals from growing on top of each other.

One more thing, if your corals are currently weak and unhealthy turn down your brightness of your lights. When corals are stressed, the lights causes more stress and often leads to STN. Turn down the lights until you figure out whats wrong. I use to think my LED's were killing my corals so I would turn them down to 70 even 50 percent. I thought it was acclimation issues from whoever I bought the corals from. Now that I have my tank dialed in, I have all my lights at 100% except for the frag tank which is at 80. and the frag tank is only at 80 because I'm trying to keep the algae under control.

 

[spuri87]

Thanks @andyman, appreciate you sharing your real experience here..

First your ph is swings over time. but even with a ph of 8.0 its low. Corals have an easier time when pH are higher (8.1 at nite to 8.4 when the lights are on.)

I never measured at night, will test pH.. but point taken.. increasing pH is easy fix I guess, will add calculated amounts of Baking Soda.. I did that once or twice before as well so I am aware of the regime.

Your po4 are high but not too bad. Heck my po4 are 0.3-0.5 and my corals are growing out of control.

Hanna's range is 200ppb which translates to 0.6 phosphates, and for me it shows 200.. actual number maybe way high haha..

I was worried about it due to people offering advice but I didn't really see problems until my no3 was at triple digits.

Same with Nitrates, Hanna's range is 75ppm and it shows 75 for me, but I am pretty sure I am also in triple digits

Thats when I realized I had to fix the problem.

What did you actually do to bring down the Nitrates?

I have not changed water in 3 years. Not even 1 percent.

I have heard about moonshiners, but I feel I am not ready yet.. though it does sound so appealing to have a thriving reef without water changes! One day maybe

Do yourself a favor, get your water tested for trace elements

That's something on my todo list for long, guess I should move my lazy a** to do it now!

One more thing, if your corals are currently weak and unhealthy turn down your brightness of your lights.

I run 2 Kessil AP9X at 25% blue / 75% intensity and 1 AI blade at 90/90/30 (Blue/Royal Blue/White) intensity for 9 hours every day.. Any Kessil and AI blade users want to chime in to help me make any amendments to this?

 

[Alexander1312]

I knew we were still missing a perspective - it’s like a menu @spuri87, you chose .

I would be curious if you were to put all the recommendations into an LLM, what it would recommend to do.

 

[spuri87]

I knew we were still missing a perspective - it’s like a menu @spuri87, you chose .

I would be curious if you were to put all the recommendations into an LLM, what it would recommend to do.

I love real people sharing real experiences.. this is the forum I can trust; not like the internet where we hear 100 different opinions with no experiences backing their comments.. I like @andyman 's statement "Nobody here will be able to help you because no body knows your tank better then yourself".. I do need to do an ICP test.. LLMs had similar opinion when I started the chat with it, maybe time to put it in Research mode with all the context from the comments in this thread and give me the best advice

 

[andyman]

I'm using a denitrator from koralin. https://www.korallin.us/s1501eng.html. Even with the denitrator my nitrates is not close to zero. Its not super low either.
Right now I wouldn't change anything in your tank. If you have slow STN in your sps then I would turn down your lights a little until you get an ICP test done. Its only $60 i think and a month to get results (you have to order it, receive it, and ship back results.). The labs are in Europe so it takes a bit of time.

I nearly gave up reefing because I couldn't identify my issues. My tank is super old and I thought I had old tank syndrome. Thats when I stumbled onto reef moonshiners. I went from not being able to keep a green slimer alive to a thriving tank. At a high high level what I did was I rebalanced my bacteria (aqua biome test) then I fixed my trace element (moonshiners ICP-MS test).

 

[MichaelB]

I missed it in your orginal post, your hanna checkers are reading above maximum range.

So you honestly have no idea what your numbers are. Nor would you have a accurate way of determining if the lyth or gfo were working.

A icp may be the way to go.

Or the high range versions of the hanna checkers would because you could test and see results. I have a high range p04 checkers you could borrow. Not really useful to me because I’m well under it and use the ulr one.

So it may need reagents I would have to check.

There are also high range Nitrate ones to. I may have one but need to check as well.

 

[Turkeysammich]

I love real people sharing real experiences.. this is the forum I can trust; not like the internet where we hear 100 different opinions with no experiences backing their comments.. I like @andyman 's statement "Nobody here will be able to help you because no body knows your tank better then yourself".. I do need to do an ICP test.. LLMs had similar opinion when I started the chat with it, maybe time to put it in Research mode with all the context from the comments in this thread and give me the best advice

The best advice is follow 1 mentor. Find an aquarium that you like. Follow what he / she is doing. Try to understand why he’s doing it. Everything else is just noise and will confuse you in the end. There are way too many options and opinions in this thread. If you listened to a little of each. You would be setting yourself up for failure. You have to find your own path. And that path is 1 person that leads you. Not a group of people who think they know what they are doing because we all don’t know. We are all just trying something.

Most important of all. Make sure they have years and years of experience. 5 years is not long in this hobby. You haven’t really earned your stripes until 10-15-20 years in. Granted there are a few outliers but very few

 

[Alexander1312]

I'm using a denitrator from koralin. https://www.korallin.us/s1501eng.html. Even with the denitrator my nitrates is not close to zero. Its not super low either.
Right now I wouldn't change anything in your tank. If you have slow STN in your sps then I would turn down your lights a little until you get an ICP test done. Its only $60 i think and a month to get results (you have to order it, receive it, and ship back results.). The labs are in Europe so it takes a bit of time.

I nearly gave up reefing because I couldn't identify my issues. My tank is super old and I thought I had old tank syndrome. Thats when I stumbled onto reef moonshiners. I went from not being able to keep a green slimer alive to a thriving tank. At a high high level what I did was I rebalanced my bacteria (aqua biome test) then I fixed my trace element (moonshiners ICP-MS test).

I have not met someone who uses this device. What are your sulfur water parameters? Any downsides using this? Expensive media? I have settled on zeolite for now but was deliberating for a while to use this. Curious to hear your experience. So you are running high phosphate and super low nitrates?

 

[tribbitt]

The best advice is follow 1 mentor. Find an aquarium that you like. Follow what he / she is doing. Try to understand why he’s doing it. Everything else is just noise and will confuse you in the end. There are way too many options and opinions in this thread. If you listened to a little of each. You would be setting yourself up for failure. You have to find your own path. And that path is 1 person that leads you. Not a group of people who think they know what they are doing because we all don’t know. We are all just trying something.

I agree with this 100%! Info overload is really easy. Pick 1-3 people at the most to mimic. Make sure these are people with similar tanks (size, parameters, stocking) that you want to achieve. Especially at the start this can help get you up to speed with intuition, whereas afterward it becomes easier to take new info in and compare it with your experience to figure out what's likely to work.

In the start, though, info is a jumble of different threads, pick one to follow

 

[L/B Block]

I will say @spuri87 -there are some very knowledgeable people on this forum compared to others I have seen that include professionals in the field. There may be differences in views on just about everything but it simply stems from different experiences and an endless array of set ups. Some love GFO and some don’t and vice versa for lanthanum, etc etc.

I think the only real consensus comes from the tang police (tangs in small aquariums) but I think you are immune from them.

All this will get sorted out in good time. It just takes..time. And patience

 

[clownvan]

Thanks @andyman, appreciate you sharing your real experience here..


I never measured at night, will test pH.. but point taken.. increasing pH is easy fix I guess, will add calculated amounts of Baking Soda.. I did that once or twice before as well so I am aware of the regime.


Hanna's range is 200ppb which translates to 0.6 phosphates, and for me it shows 200.. actual number maybe way high haha..


Same with Nitrates, Hanna's range is 75ppm and it shows 75 for me, but I am pretty sure I am also in triple digits


What did you actually do to bring down the Nitrates?


I have heard about moonshiners, but I feel I am not ready yet.. though it does sound so appealing to have a thriving reef without water changes! One day maybe


That's something on my todo list for long, guess I should move my lazy a** to do it now!


I run 2 Kessil AP9X at 25% blue / 75% intensity and 1 AI blade at 90/90/30 (Blue/Royal Blue/White) intensity for 9 hours every day.. Any Kessil and AI blade users want to chime in to help me make any amendments to this?

You should use a PAR meter to understand what your lights are giving below the surface and at what depth. The club has PAR meters that you can borrow.

I run my ap9x at 15% to 20% 12" from the surface of the water. 6" below the surface, I am at 100 par I think (I have to look at my notes).

 

[Slingfox]

Sorry had to make a couple of comments on the salt statements you made above, with which I am not fundamentally disagreeing:

I am note sure if the reference about which salts are most often used by professionals are not misleading. Quality Marine, uses Tropic Marin salt unless they changed very recently, Top Self in my opinion also do not only use these type of salts, and prefer higher end salts for their more critical tanks (including Tropic Marin I believe). So maybe there is a ton of basement farmers who use these type of inexpensive salts to manage their cost, including Zoos, so not sure if this an adequate representation of usage by quality vendors. I could be wrong.

But the main point I wanted to make is that all salts use anti caking agents, and there is only one salt on the market that I know of which does not, which is the new Purity salt from the joint venture product of Tropic Marin and Fauna Marin.

Also, Tropic Marin has lower alk because pro farmers often run closer to an ULNS model and want to be better able to manage their alk avoiding higher alk values within a low nutrient environment which s not liked by SPS. I have also started to run my system closer to 7.5 dkh and found SPS doing better.

If you ever have a chance to go to Reefapalooza or one of the big coral show walk to the various booth and ask each vendor (including the very famous ones) what salt they use, what dosing they do, how they manage pests, etc. To my surprise Reef Crystals and IO who come up the most often! This also consistent with the interviews with the major coral growers on the various reefing podcasts.

Despite all this is still use the higher priced Nyos Pure since it has alk at a range I like and it mixes clean. The brown sludge most salts leave likely has zero affect on coral but I just don’t like looking at a dirty mixing barrel.

If you want a somewhat objective side-by-side measure of salt “quality” take a look here where 13 different salts were compared:

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/the-ultimate-salt-test.949805/

 

[Slingfox]

I have not met someone who uses this device. What are your sulfur water parameters? Any downsides using this? Expensive media? I have settled on zeolite for now but was deliberating for a while to use this. Curious to hear your experience. So you are running high phosphate and super low nitrates?

Denitrators are commonly used in tanks with very high bioloads. They seem to be more common on FOWLR systems than coral focused systems. If you run a 1000 gallon predator tank for example a denitrator is one way to help keep nitrates near target levels.

 

[Slingfox]

You should use a PAR meter to understand what your lights are giving below the surface and at what depth. The club has PAR meters that you can borrow.

I run my ap9x at 15% to 20% 12" from the surface of the water. 6" below the surface, I am at 100 par I think (I have to look at my notes).

Agreed. The club’s PAR meter are a great resource. What I did for my old and new lights is I used the club PAR meter to test the PAR at key areas of the tank and set the light intensity and position accordingly.

On an unrelated point, if you are looking to run some ICP tests, the most economical out there currently is Modern Reef. I have bunch of those sitting around and will at some point do a head-to-head comparison against ATI which I also have laying around. I have also used Fauna Marine and ReefLab and have no preference or view other than some are easier to mail in and some are more expensive. I will say that ICP-MS is a lot better than ICP-OES so go with a provider that provides a MS testing service.