so to recap, to have in line for future retro measurement my stance of the last fifteen years regarding ammonia alert posts across forums:
Not in any case was the alert real. Not in any case was the alert backed by digital calibrated measure, not one outlier as mentioned. if fish died, they died before ammonia spiked initially. only fish death left in the tank or meds dosed will cause a current typical reef tank to lose ammonia control. outside of that, all ammonia alert posts are to instantly be regarded as false reads, since thats 100% of available examples. Knowledge of test brand specifics allowed you guys to quickly determine the reason for the misread here.
Reef tanks trend towards control vs noncontrol of free ammonia and the working range tbd is currently viewed as thousandths ppm because that's the only digital meter we have in the hobby and nothing is available to benchmark it yet. Only old cycling science, the scary kind that coincidentally sells lots of repeat bottle bac to buyers to address a fearful condition I claim does not exist, ever allows for outliers in ammonia control after cycling. Updated cycling science does not teach fear and constant worry, we dont need to run ammonia tests after cycling and we never needed nitrite data in any phase. in every collected example I approached the matter of ammonia noncontrol as a misread, pics didn't fail to corroborate in my opinion.
Every single entrant in my collection thread is in the thousandths ppm, right at the time they're posting an nh4 reading appearing to be teetering on doom at 2+ ppm.
-it is 100% possible to diagnose ammonia issues from tank pics given a few biomarkers and timelines in place. a major contributor in the diagnostics is the lack of any linkable outliers. Mis reporting of actual ammonia measures is so common in the hobby, tank pictures are now far more reliable than someones interpretation from a non digital test kit. when biomarkers aren't in place, newly cycled dry rock systems often lack them, the # of days the tank has had water and boosters in it becomes more reliable in control assessment than someone's interpretation of a non digital ammonia testing.
I have never seen one reef tank ever, ever fail to control its ammonia, ergo every ammonia alert post is a false alarm since the title 100% involves a test reading interp vs an observable tank condition.
any reef lacking surface area controls to run its bioload will have compounding ammonia issues from cumulative waste + bioloading and will die soon, it can't live for months.
-until we get accurate ammonia studies using densely stocked fish only setups we won't know the full dynamics of surface area/ ammonia control in reefing and are left to make forecasts only about what happens in the setups that truly exceed stocking densities we see in reefs.
If a heavily stocked fish only setup using live rock and some type of common external filter + surface area arrangement consistently runs at .05 ppm I will be flatly amazed, I predict those too run in the upper thousandths. once the normal safety zone of a marine aquarium is breached by too heavy bioload, a quick tipping point occurs. when this happens in quarantine tanks they do a water change, or dose prime, or dose bottle bac, a reaction is needed or the fish will die and the water will begin to turn gray. Fish only setups don't have a way to slightly exceed safe nh3 constants that any common reef tank will show, or they'll tip into doom, that's my prediction for when the time comes we have ways to look back and measure the dynamics at hand.
I predict both reef tanks and heavily stocked fish only tanks using reef rock in the display run in the thousandths.
**heavily stocked systems that dont use rock in the display, but sequester the surface area in sumps or in filters that receive overflow from the main display may very well carry higher nh3 level than normal since there isn't immediate waste contact to the working surfaces inside the display. If there's rocks inside a display to any normal degree, i think this triggers the .00x constant we find on so many hundreds of uploaded seneye logs tank to tank.
