Cant keep nitrates or phosphates and need advice please

[Salty_Northerner]

Any help in why I cant keep nitrates or phosphates in my system?

Switched to TM Bio-Actif salt mix and things were looking up but now Nitrates and Phosphates are bottoming out.

Been dosing TM Plus-NP @1.5ml per day. Hanna HR Nitrate shows 0.0 for the past 2 days and p04 is struggling and is on a downward trend. Was at 18ppb and yesterday down to 8ppb

Been feeding more, added another fish last Friday and added reefroids to help dirty the water, but nothing has worked so far.

Should I put aside the TM plus NP and use Brightwell Neophos or what?

Should I pull one of the bags of biogems out of the rear chamber, I have 2 big bags. Also I have the skimmer off the past few days.

Any advice would be great.

 

[Saltyreef]

Leave the gems, leave the skimmer.

you should have neophos and neonitro on hand.

Start dosing and slowly increasing until you get a reading. Once you get a reading, slow down or stop and keep testing daily to see where you are at.

Your system is likely processing the nitrate and phosphate faster than it can be added in supplimental form.

Keep at it. Slow and steady wins the race.

 

[Salty_Northerner]

Leave the gems, leave the skimmer.

you should have neophos and neonitro on hand.

Start dosing and slowly increasing until you get a reading. Once you get a reading, slow down or stop and keep testing daily to see where you are at.

Your system is likely processing the nitrate and phosphate faster than it can be added in supplimental form.

Keep at it. Slow and steady wins the race.

I have Neophos on hand but It be next week if I order neonitro so would that Seachem flourish nitrogen work?

 

[Saltyreef]

I have Neophos on hand but It be next week if I order neonitro so would that Seachem flourish nitrogen work?

Yes. You just want to be able to dose independently if you are completely bottomed out on nitrate but not phosphate.

 

[Salty_Northerner]

Yes. You just want to be able to dose independently if you are completely bottomed out on nitrate but not phosphate.

Thank you Im looking to see if I can find the seachem locally before I order Neonitro

 

[Salty_Northerner]

This doesn't look right for the amount to dose does it?
I need some advise before I start to add some nitrogen to the water. I'm taking rock and such into consideration on the actual amount of system water.

 

[Salty_Northerner]

anyone?

 

[Lavey29]

I had to double dose neophos and neonitro for months to get readable numbers. This is something most tanks go through during maturing process.

 

[Salty_Northerner]

I had to double dose neophos and neonitro for months to get readable numbers. This is something most tanks go through during maturing process.

Im leaning towards getting a bottle of this over the neonitro. It seems like its better and easier to dose.

 

[Lavey29]

Im leaning towards getting a bottle of this over the neonitro. It seems like its better and easier to dose.

I'm sure various things work. I had no negative effects with neophos and neonitro. You want nitrates at 10 and phosphate. 05 to .1

 

[Salty_Northerner]

I'm sure various things work. I had no negative effects with neophos and neonitro. You want nitrates at 10 and phosphate. 05 to .1

The EVS nitrate seems to be the better choice after reading Randy's post.
The ingredients are spot on to what he was saying.

 

[Court_Appointed_Hypeman]

Plus NP has nitrogen that is not measurable, and I wouldn't dose neophos on top of it.

When my nitrates are reading 0 i dose neonitro at the recomended dose between 1 and 3 times a day depending on how quickly it hits 0. But from what I understand it should not be necessary to dose Nitro either, but I did that along with plus NP for a couple months and it was fine.

Eventually you will get a good balance and your nitrates and phosphates should stop sitting on 0 all the time.

I went from plus NP to bacto balance when my phos hit .05, stayed on bacto balance until i had green algae die off due to trace element depletion and it shot my phosphates up to .46.

The last 3 weeks I have been dosing ElimiNP and I am almost back down to .08 where I plan to switch back to bacto. I stipped dosing nitrates about 2 days into bactobalance because they stopped depleting, hit near 12 and hovered there for a couple weeks.

Next time my nitrates 0 out, i am going to try and let bacto balance or Plus NP, whichever I am on at the time, handle it.

However, I think I am at the point where I can just start harvesting chaeto to combat 0 readings.

 

[Salty_Northerner]

Plus NP has nitrogen that is not measurable, and I wouldn't dose neophos on top of it.

When my nitrates are reading 0 i dose neonitro at the recomended dose between 1 and 3 times a day depending on how quickly it hits 0. But from what I understand it should not be necessary to dose Nitro either, but I did that along with plus NP for a couple months and it was fine.

Eventually you will get a good balance and your nitrates and phosphates should stop sitting on 0 all the time.

I went from plus NP to bacto balance when my phos hit .05, stayed on bacto balance until i had green algae die off due to trace element depletion and it shot my phosphates up to .46.

The last 3 weeks I have been dosing ElimiNP and I am almost back down to .08 where I plan to switch back to bacto. I stipped dosing nitrates about 2 days into bactobalance because they stopped depleting, hit near 12 and hovered there for a couple weeks.

Next time my nitrates 0 out, i am going to try and let bacto balance or Plus NP, whichever I am on at the time, handle it.

However, I think I am at the point where I can just start harvesting chaeto to combat 0 readings.

Thank you that was some great info!

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

I'm not a fan of neonitro and neophos. Expensive and weak and no purity info.

A better choice is food grade sodium or calcium nitrate, and food grade sodium phosphate. Dosing is easy and inexpensive.

 

[Salty_Northerner]

I'm not a fan of neonitro and neophos. Expensive and weak and no purity info.

A better choice is food grade sodium or calcium nitrate, and food grade sodium phosphate. Dosing is easy and inexpensive.

I ordered the calcium based ESV nitrate. Though TM make these additives sound appealing I'm starting to have second thoughts about using them. Just funky things are happening to my tanks water as example yesterday evening I walked into the room and the water was white! I don't know what's going on but just hoped the trocus snail realeased it's love juice into the water as it was so smoky looking. Gotta go check and see if it improved this morning. I just hope nothing fell out of solution.

 

[Salty_Northerner]

Water clarity last evening looked like this. Any ideas why the water would look like this? The only thing I changed was adding 2 new filter socks and they were rinsed under RODI water before placed into the chambers.

 

[Salty_Northerner]

@Randy Holmes-Farley I've asked Hans what the purity is and any other info that I cant find online. Hopefully he gives me something to better understand things thats going on. Would you reccomend I add some nitrate to my system, I understand all systems are different and you wouldn't want any blame for commenting but I ask what would you do?

I do take what you say seriously and look at you as a mentor when it comes to water science
All I was able to find locally was Seachem Flourish Nitrogen but haven't added any just because to be honest I don't know how much to add, and don't know if it's compatible tbh. Tank volume is 32-33 gallons

 

[Tcook]

Is this tank only 6 weeks old? You will have the opposite problem soon enough. Go slow and don’t stress yourself.

 

[Salty_Northerner]

Is this tank only 6 weeks old? You will have the opposite problem soon enough.

Kinda sorta, its a new tank and the only thing that is new is the sand bed. Its a shallow bed, I added all the rock from my other tank and all the bio media as-well and even added more to what was from the other tank.

 

[Court_Appointed_Hypeman]

I experienced the same thing at the same time, but at this point I was not yet dosing any carbon products. At this point I only dosed some nitrates to keep my chaeto alive.

I got a mean green machine from petco ti run in my display, ran it and it cleared up in about 24 hours.

Since this is so similar, I am wondering... and maybe you don't since you are carbon dosing, but have you see any brown snot or flowy brown stuff on your rocks or glass? I had dinos imidiately following this, of which I combated by running the UV again, along with keeping phos and nitrate up along with dosing silica.