Carbon dosing

[justy]

Yes higher input was recent. So will take it slowly
Do you have a build thread would love to take a look.
Cheers

 

[justy]

My tanks always looked and ran better keeping nitrates near zero when carbon dosing and feeding well like that. Plus it’s nice to be able to add a little nitrate when it gets clear on a kit in order to lower phosphate which is always there for me and probably most carbon source users. Using this method I can always keep phosphate under .04 and nitrates barely readable.

Thanks very interesting will take it easy.

 

[sgrosenb]

There are no shortage of ways to keep your N and P down. I just use 3" of sand to crush the nitrate, ROUTINE water changes, fuge to keep the phosphate at bay. I also have multiple skimmers in each tank (two good/great skimmers can outperform one of the "best" ones). Some folks with sand and no nitrate issues just use a bit of GFO or Lan Chloride to help with po4.

@jda reviving an old thread here. I fall into the bucket of having sand and no nitrates (I dose nitrates - Loudwolf Sodium Nitrate to be exact - to keep them around 5ppm), but my PO4 is constantly a battle. I have a lot of live rock, a fuge with chaeto that grows like crazy, I am very good about water changes, and I have a strong protein skimmer. I use GFO pretty much constantly to try and keep my PO4 below 0.1, but I tend to get the yo-yo effect you often speak of where it goes down to 0.05, then the GFO is depleted and it comes back up to 0.12 or something like that, and then I add more GFO, and the process continues. My corals are doing OK, but I know with better consistency on my PO4, I'd have better results. I have not let up on the feeding at all (I feed both frozen and dry pellets), as you and others have said time and again not to lower input (which makes total sense to me). I feed between 4-6 frozen shrimp cubes per day, along with a pinch of pellets, in my 165 gallon tank.

My question is this - understanding that using less GFO and changing it out more often may yield better results for me right now, do you think that eventually I will be able to deplete all the PO4 stuck in the rocks, sand, etc so that I don't have to use GFO anymore? Or to the point where I may be able to even add a bit of coral food like Reefroids to maintain PO4 above 0?

Thanks as always for your advice and guidance.

-Scott

 

[Bitcoin Reefer]

There are no shortage of ways to keep your N and P down. I just use 3" of sand to crush the nitrate, ROUTINE water changes, fuge to keep the phosphate at bay. I also have multiple skimmers in each tank (two good/great skimmers can outperform one of the "best" ones). Some folks with sand and no nitrate issues just use a bit of GFO or Lan Chloride to help with po4.

With my tank, carbon dosing would not do much since the sand can get all of the N and without the N, the bacteria will not grow enough to consume any P.

Here is my normal disclaimer - chasing N and P is a bad idea. Having a well-planned, slow approach to getting them low and then keeping them there is totally fine. Nature would do it slowly while bacteria and fauna build up, then when it got low, it would find an equilibrium where there was just enough to keep the equilibrium moving forward - work in this same vein. For example, carbon dosing to get N at 20 and P at .25 down to 1 and .03 in a few weeks is really dumb - the carbon dosing gets blamed here, but the approach and "chasing" is the real problem. Doing that same thing over 6 months and then starting to cut back near the end will cause no issues. Using as much GFO as you can stuff into a reactor to get P down quickly, then having it bounce back up when the aragonite releases of phosphate, then repeat a few times - this is bad with the low and high spikes whereas using just a tiny bit of GFO to slowly and methodically while replacing it often is totally fine. It is not the GFOs fault if you use it wrong.

So more sand helps with Nitrate but not Phosphate? Interesting.

 

[Rick5]

@jda reviving an old thread here. I fall into the bucket of having sand and no nitrates (I dose nitrates - Loudwolf Sodium Nitrate to be exact - to keep them around 5ppm), but my PO4 is constantly a battle. I have a lot of live rock, a fuge with chaeto that grows like crazy, I am very good about water changes, and I have a strong protein skimmer. I use GFO pretty much constantly to try and keep my PO4 below 0.1, but I tend to get the yo-yo effect you often speak of where it goes down to 0.05, then the GFO is depleted and it comes back up to 0.12 or something like that, and then I add more GFO, and the process continues. My corals are doing OK, but I know with better consistency on my PO4, I'd have better results. I have not let up on the feeding at all (I feed both frozen and dry pellets), as you and others have said time and again not to lower input (which makes total sense to me). I feed between 4-6 frozen shrimp cubes per day, along with a pinch of pellets, in my 165 gallon tank.

My question is this - understanding that using less GFO and changing it out more often may yield better results for me right now, do you think that eventually I will be able to deplete all the PO4 stuck in the rocks, sand, etc so that I don't have to use GFO anymore? Or to the point where I may be able to even add a bit of coral food like Reefroids to maintain PO4 above 0?

Thanks as always for your advice and guidance.

-Scott

I know you didn’t direct your post at me, but I’ll offer my input anyway. Running something like diluted Phosphate RX on a doser may help eliminate the yo yo effect, particularly if your feeding is fairly consistent.

In my opinion, it can be done with GFO but you have to measure and test more (whereas I just increase my diluted Phosphate RX by .1 ml in the doser’s app and wait a week and test again). My process admittedly failed me when my skimmer stopped working and I stopped testing, which is user error.

On a related note, I had some of the FL live/cultured rock two years ago or so. The tank didn’t have any SPS. I hand dosed Phosphate RX (without diluting it) heavily until I got to a point where I was convinced I no longer had any bound up phosphate. Of course, when I fed the tank, the phosphate elevated slightly.