Blastos and Water Quality

[William Morris]

Interested in other's experiences with Blastos and the quality of your water.
I am growing out a Blasto Garden and have about 12 or so right now in my 32G Biocube.
I have been feeding them Reef Roids twice a week - target feeding.

I have lost a couple of heads in the last few days and want to deepen my knowledge base with these guys.
My parameters:

• Phosphate: 1.0
• Calcium: 420
• Alkalinity: 9.0
• PH: 8.14
• Nitrate: 15
• Salinity 1.024

Tank has been running for a little over 3 years.

 

[Ludders]

I don't feed mine directly and they seem to do well.
Has anything changed with your water chemistry recently?

 

[William Morris]

Just keeping Alk up with 2 part dosing and putting a Co2 scrubber on my skimmer which has elevated PH.

 

[DothanReefer]

I also have a lil blasto garden going, tho I don’t feed mine directly either. They can be finicky but stability seems to be best. They don’t like me changing the flow or lighting at all!! I keep PO4 at around 0.12-.15 and NO3 around 10ppm and they seem to like that best.

is the PO4 number you mentioned above accurate? A reading of 1.0 ppm seems extremely high...

 

[William Morris]

Operator error - PO4 is 0.1
The one thing I did was dose the soda ash all at one time - 10ml.
Now I am putting small amounts in over an hour or so.
I don't have an automatic dosing system setup yet - still contemplating that.

 

[DothanReefer]

Operator error - PO4 is 0.1
The one thing I did was dose the soda ash all at one time - 10ml.
Now I am putting small amounts in over an hour or so.
I don't have an automatic dosing system setup yet - still contemplating that.

I figured that was the case. At .1 I wouldn't think that nutrients are an issue...

I just dose by hand too. Once u get the daily amount locked in, it's too easy to do it by hand and forces me to pay attention to the tank on days it could go overlooked...keeps me in the loop on what's going on within...I like that.

Let's see a pic of your garden!? I'll try to get one of mine tonight and post here. I have 5 or 6 growing right now...

 

[William Morris]

Do you dose it all at once or over a period of time?
I wonder if the potential spike in PH is creating a problem if I dose all at one time.
I will get a pic later today - it will be a while before the lights come on.

 

[DothanReefer]

My dose is rather small, 10ml, so I dose it all at one time.

 

[William Morris]

I also dose 10ml. How big is your tank?

 

[DothanReefer]

100g