Best way to raise Nitrates

[saturn13]

Hey everyone,

So my understanding is that nitrates should be higher than phospahtes, and both of mine are really low, nitrates undetecabke to the eye with salifert kit, or high doing low range conversion around 2ppm. phos at 0.04 ppm dosed by Neophos. should I bring up my nitrates at all with Neonitro?

Thanks

 

[piranhaman00]

2ppm NO3 and 0.04ppm PO4 is pretty great for SPS! You could always bring your nitrate up. People have success at 5-25ppm. PO4, 0.01-0.5ppm.

 

[Halal Hotdog]

Easiest way to bring nitrates and phosphates up is to feed more. Another option is to cut back on the filtration. Dosing nitrates and phosphates seem crazy to me.

 

[Miller535]

Hey everyone,

So my understanding is that nitrates should be higher than phospahtes, and both of mine are really low, nitrates undetecabke to the eye with salifert kit, or high doing low range conversion around 2ppm. phos at 0.04 ppm dosed by Neophos. should I bring up my nitrates at all with Neonitro?

Thanks

I used neo nitro and it worked great. Many will tell you just feed more, but the problem with that is that you are not just added nitrate with food, but a bunch of other organics. Dose the neo nitro, start low, and test the next day.

 

[Miller535]

Adding more fish if you have room helps a lot too.

 

[ScottB]

Hey everyone,

So my understanding is that nitrates should be higher than phospahtes, and both of mine are really low, nitrates undetecabke to the eye with salifert kit, or high doing low range conversion around 2ppm. phos at 0.04 ppm dosed by Neophos. should I bring up my nitrates at all with Neonitro?

Thanks

Couple questions:
a) How old is the tank?
b) Do you have any algae (film or hair or turf)?
c) Are you trying to correct a "problem" like cyano or anything?

If the system is less than a year old I wouldn't dose. Just add some fish. Or feed more often.
If you have any algae, then you have sufficient NO3.

Your PO4 level is fine. At some point your rock will saturate with PO4 and you won't have to dose often or at all.

Take care when dosing NO3 to a "cleanish" tank. There is a strong tendency for that to lower PO4 in a nitrate limited system. I would hold off until your able to keep measurable PO4 without dosing. Or at a minimum keep a close eye on PO4.

 

[Miller535]

Couple questions:
a) How old is the tank?
b) Do you have any algae (film or hair or turf)?
c) Are you trying to correct a "problem" like cyano or anything?

If the system is less than a year old I wouldn't dose. Just add some fish. Or feed more often.
If you have any algae, then you have sufficient NO3.

Your PO4 level is fine. At some point your rock will saturate with PO4 and you won't have to dose often or at all.

Take care when dosing NO3 to a "cleanish" tank. There is a strong tendency for that to lower PO4 in a nitrate limited system. I would hold off until your able to keep measurable PO4 without dosing. Or at a minimum keep a close eye on PO4.

That is a good point. I have not cycled a tank in probably 7 years where I used live rock which had die off and had NO3 and PO4 from the start. I forget sometimes how clean these new dry rock tanks are.

 

[saturn13]

Couple questions:
a) How old is the tank?
b) Do you have any algae (film or hair or turf)?
c) Are you trying to correct a "problem" like cyano or anything?

If the system is less than a year old I wouldn't dose. Just add some fish. Or feed more often.
If you have any algae, then you have sufficient NO3.

Your PO4 level is fine. At some point your rock will saturate with PO4 and you won't have to dose often or at all.

Take care when dosing NO3 to a "cleanish" tank. There is a strong tendency for that to lower PO4 in a nitrate limited system. I would hold off until your able to keep measurable PO4 without dosing. Or at a minimum keep a close eye on PO4.

Over a year. It's a frag tank, onky a couple firefish. No alage, I'm running a alage scrubber and the growth there isn't really much. no correction other than trying to get more growth.

 

[ScottB]

Hey everyone,

So my understanding is that nitrates should be higher than phospahtes, and both of mine are really low, nitrates undetecabke to the eye with salifert kit, or high doing low range conversion around 2ppm. phos at 0.04 ppm dosed by Neophos. should I bring up my nitrates at all with Neonitro?

Thanks

BTW, for low range NO3 measuring, the best test kit IME is NYOS. Much easier to read for low range.

 

[Miller535]

Over a year. It's a frag tank, onky a couple firefish. No alage, I'm running a alage scrubber and the growth there isn't really much. no correction other than trying to get more growth.

I wouldn't run a scrubber on a tank with that little bio load, and with such low nutrients.

 

[ScottB]

Over a year. It's a frag tank, onky a couple firefish. No alage, I'm running a alage scrubber and the growth there isn't really much. no correction other than trying to get more growth.

Got it.

Algae scrubbers are very effective at maintaining a "heavy in / heavy out" system. I run my frag system this way to pretty good effect. But I have almost three pounds of fish in there, grazing and pooping all day.

Do you have the size to support some tangs or large fish?

 

[saturn13]

Got it.

Algae scrubbers are very effective at maintaining a "heavy in / heavy out" system. I run my frag system this way to pretty good effect. But I have almost three pounds of fish in there, grazing and pooping all day.

Do you have the size to support some tangs or large fish?

its only a 45 gallon deep blue

 

[Lasse]

The problem with the advise - feed more when you are satisfied with one of the major nutrients is that you will raise that too. If you want to go the "feed more way" - use Nori in order to rise NO3 and Reef Roids for rising PO4. I do not know what Neonitro is - I use NaNO3 or Chile saltpetre from the spice shelf of my grocery store (40 g NaNO3 in 500 ml of water as stock solution. 1 ml of this in 100 L of water rise the NO3 with around 0.5 ppm - not exactly but around that.)

Sincerely Lasse

 

[ThePurple12]

I use Spectracide stump remover for dosing nitrate. It’s like $10 and easy to dose using a kn03 dosing calculator.

 

[ScottB]

its only a 45 gallon deep blue

Even if it is a frag layout, that is a tad small for any tangs other than a juvenile tomini. The Tang Police be giving you noise even with that. But there are many other good "working" fish to choose from though that bring other benefits besides usable nutrient.

 

[saturn13]

I use Spectracide stump remover for dosing nitrate. It’s like $10 and easy to dose using a kn03 dosing calculator.

Spectracide ?

 

[saturn13]

The problem with the advise - feed more when you are satisfied with one of the major nutrients is that you will raise that too. If you want to go the "feed more way" - use Nori in order to rise NO3 and Reef Roids for rising PO4. I do not know what Neonitro is - I use NaNO3 or Chile saltpetre from the spice shelf of my grocery store (40 g NaNO3 in 500 ml of water as stock solution. 1 ml of this in 100 L of water rise the NO3 with around 0.5 ppm - not exactly but around that.)

Sincerely Lasse

Not sure what Nori is

 

[ThePurple12]

Spectracide ?

Yes, here it is on Amazon for 6 bucks

 

[ReefLab]

0.04 PO4 and 2ppm NO3 is great IMO. as long as they don't get to zero.
How do your corals look?
you can make a potassium nitrate and potassium phosphate solution to dose when you need to. Cheapest and easiest way to do it since you can make the solutions such that 1mL=0.1ppm in your tank or whatever you want.

 

[Hallowhead]

I've been dosing both stump crap for nitrates and trisodium phosphate for a long time now. It's very hard for me to register anything.

This is attributed to dinos... But they're almost wiped out. I'm nervous one day I'm gonna have so saturated rock that my phosphates are gonna kill everything.