The only quick fix would be a large WC. Dosing big volumes of carbon will bottom out your nutrients in a young system and invite cyano, Dino or both. I would deal with it with a large wc personally I wouldn’t carbon dose you don’t even have livestock yet to provide the waste to feed the bacteria you would grow from carbon dosing. I would assume you over did the ammonia during the cycle which has caused your elevated nitrates.
Yeah, I didn't believe the initial cycle happened so quickly, so I kept trying to spike the ammonia, lol. And as I said in the original post, a large water change isn't practical. I only have enough water storage for about 30 gallons, maybe I could have bumped that up to 50 temporarily, but still, a 50 gallon water change wouldn't have been good enough, haha.
Anyway, that was a month ago. Through aggressive carbon dosing, I was able to drop the nitrates from 100+ to 50 in a week, then it took another week to half it again. When I got it down to 50, I planted some more macros. When I got it down to 25, I started to ease up on the carbon dosing (I don't really want to do it all the time).
In regards to cyano, there is a tiny bit forming in more stagnant corners. It will be another couple months, but I'll be down to a proper Redfield ratio soon.
Have you imported dinos into the system
they don’t come in bagged sand or dry rock
this sounds like a creative idea. We used single dose ammonia to cycle big tanks in our cycling threads / already known amount of acceptable nitrates given nitrification / but I struggle to think why this won’t work.
maybe cloudy a while, but if you strip too low you can add back with loudwolf dosers it seems
I did put in a seed rock, and since then some macros, so dinos and other beneficial life would have been imported with those.
Another note, the main rock was only "dry" for a couple months. My live rock tank burst (LOL), so I just let the rocks sit there until I was ready to use them. Point being, there may have been some bio-diversity tucked into the wee pockets of the rock.
Seeing how this turned out, I should have taken notes. I don't recall dosing ammonia until after the initial ammonia spike was resolved. I assumed there was enough die off on the rocks to kick off the cycle, which there was. I then overdosed ammonia to try to get a significant spike again (I couldn't push it over 1ppm).
Then, I tested nitrates. Which were through the roof.
Then posted this thread; didn't get a related response, so I proceeded on my own.
I did install a protein skimmer before dosing any vinegar. I ramped up from 1:10 to 2:1 (vinegar : gallons of water) in two weeks. As mentioned above, this dramatically reduced the nitrates but reduction seemed to taper off around 50ppm down to 25 (which I thought was interesting).
Now that I am down to 25ppm, I have started to taper off the dosing. So I am doing 2:1 every two days. I'll scale that down to a lower daily dose next week.
I also have a reasonable sized refugium going with macros and a 24x7 light which I added more around the 50ppm reading.
In conclusion, it more or less did work. However, I didn't test regularly or thoroughly. If I were to apply the scientific method, I should have done more phosphate tests, and I should have tested oxygen at defined points as well as documented it properly.
