Cautionary tale of dosing

[Shrader18]

LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES: 127 gallon tank, sump included LPS SPS FISH INVERTS

Tank was going well, 8 months today. Nitrates/phos bottomed out. Good growth good color but wanted to push growth so I said hmmm I need more nitrates. I heard 10-15 is a good number..... tried overfeeding nothing, like seriou over feeding. Found sodium nitrate.... I used calculator as built by someone in this group. Worked great jumped from 0 to 5.8 first test... so I decided to double the dose two days later. Went from 5.8 to 18.1 in three days. All was okay for a day then tank and white rocks turned brown, deep brown. TWO other obs: LPS AND TORCH GREAT COLOR AND THICK, SPS MONTI, PAVONA, acro super bleached and started to turn brown.

added bacteria to slow and start nitrogen process. Stabilized nitrates at 16.1. Left for two days nitrates stabilized but not coming down. Today I did an 80% water change dropped nitrates from 16.1 to 11.1 will do another 30% change before I fill back up and be done by Monday.

what did I learn:
- if all is well don't tinker
- if I do dose, slow and steady. Way to wicked fast on the nitrates It may not be the amount but the rate of change way too fast.
- SODIUM NITRATE WORKS FAST AND HAS A LAG EFFECT
- I had to drain tank 75% and all of sump- removed approx 80-90 gallons
- spending all weekend fixing a problem that I didn't need to create sucks....

 

[Saltyreef]

LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES: 127 gallon tank, sump included LPS SPS FISH INVERTS

Tank was going well, 8 months today. Nitrates/phos bottomed out. Good growth good color but wanted to push growth so I said hmmm I need more nitrates. I heard 10-15 is a good number..... tried overfeeding nothing, like seriou over feeding. Found sodium nitrate.... I used calculator as built by someone in this group. Worked great jumped from 0 to 5.8 first test... so I decided to double the dose two days later. Went from 5.8 to 18.1 in three days. All was okay for a day then tank and white rocks turned brown, deep brown. TWO other obs: LPS AND TORCH GREAT COLOR AND THICK, SPS MONTI, PAVONA, acro super bleached and started to turn brown.

added bacteria to slow and start nitrogen process. Stabilized nitrates at 16.1. Left for two days nitrates stabilized but not coming down. Today I did an 80% water change dropped nitrates from 16.1 to 11.1 will do another 30% change before I fill back up and be done by Monday.

what did I learn:
- if all is well don't tinker
- if I do dose, slow and steady. Way to wicked fast on the nitrates It may not be the amount but the rate of change way too fast.
- SODIUM NITRATE WORKS FAST AND HAS A LAG EFFECT
- I had to drain tank 75% and all of sump- removed approx 80-90 gallons
- spending all weekend fixing a problem that I didn't need to create sucks....

Yep....did the same thing with nitrate....

Nuked my beutiful 4 year old 40 breeder full of high end ****.....

I feel your pain. Dosing nutrients has the "ketchup" effect as coined by Lasse!
Tapping the back of a glass ketchup bottle, nothing nothing nothing BAM all the ketchup on your plate lol.

 

[aimed]

Yeah, what is happening is somethings eating it, once it’s “full” your levels start to rise quickly.

 

[Shrader18]

Yep....did the same thing with nitrate....

Nuked my beutiful 4 year old 40 breeder full of high end ****.....

I feel your pain. Dosing nutrients has the "ketchup" effect as coined by Lasse!
Tapping the back of a glass ketchup bottle, nothing nothing nothing BAM all the ketchup on your plate lol.

Lol great analogy! Yeah lesson learned I hope I save at least one person from this

 

[Shrader18]

Yeah, what is happening is somethings eating it, once it’s “full” your levels start to rise quickly.

Yeah noticed that and great info to pass on

 

[diabolical_clownfish]

- SODIUM NITRATE WORKS FAST AND HAS A LAG EFFECT

I also recently got into the nutrient dosing game. It's not clear to me what you mean by comment here about lag. Two thoughts:

- Assuming you did the math correctly, you should see 100% of the effect immediately after dosing. Sodium nitrate is not like All-for-Reef where you have to wait 3 days to see the effect. There should be no lag.
- Randy previously commented that there's no reason to incrementally raise nitrate. If your target is to go from 0 to 5 ppm, seems reasonable to just dose to the target directly. Your problem, however, is that the target of 18 ppm is too high for SPS. So even if you had dosed to 18 ppm over the course of the month, the SPS corals would still react negatively.

I'm also a beginner and here to learn, happy to hear other thoughts.

 

[Shrader18]

I also recently got into the nutrient dosing game. It's not clear to me what you mean by comment here about lag. Two thoughts:

- Assuming you did the math correctly, you should see 100% of the effect immediately after dosing. Sodium nitrate is not like All-for-Reef where you have to wait 3 days to see the effect. There should be no lag.
- Randy previously commented that there's no reason to incrementally raise nitrate. If your target is to go from 0 to 5 ppm, seems reasonable to just dose to the target directly. Your problem, however, is that the target of 18 ppm is too high for SPS. So even if you had dosed to 18 ppm over the course of the month, the SPS corals would still react negatively.

I'm also a beginner and here to learn, happy to hear other thoughts.

So I followed the calculator and did 1 tsp for 125 gallons to raise nitrates to 6. There may not be a "true" lag however as another commented above when there is not enough bacteria to "eat" the nitrates for the cycle they just keep going up.

So in effect the lag is really just a saturation? Not sure but lesson is still go slow. So I hear what you say about Randy's comments, at some point in the reef game you will contemplate doing something to get better results. There are tons of opinions and honestly everyones tanks are different based off size, stock, etc. Everyone attempts to get these beautiful coral growth tanks and want them overnight. I was going for a good balance. i've learned 3-5ppm on nitrates is going to be ideal. with phos of .03. That seemed to have the best results for me.

 

[Shrader18]

Yep....did the same thing with nitrate....

Nuked my beutiful 4 year old 40 breeder full of high end ****.....

I feel your pain. Dosing nutrients has the "ketchup" effect as coined by Lasse!
Tapping the back of a glass ketchup bottle, nothing nothing nothing BAM all the ketchup on your plate lol.

Quick thought, do i need to do another 50% water change on the residual to drop the nitrate from 11.1 to 6? or will adding the other 70 gallons of water dilute it for me?

 

[Saltyreef]

Quick thought, do i need to do another 50% water change on the residual to drop the nitrate from 11.1 to 6? or will adding the other 70 gallons of water dilute it for me?

Adding 70 gallons of fresh salt water should lower your nitrate more.

 

[Gatorpa]

Wish I would have seen this a bit ago.
Decided to dose No3
took it from undetected to 10 in about 20 days, started to notice less PE and then the alk popped to 10.5 from 9.

Lost a super fuzzy tenuis due to STN. a few others got mild stn which has halted when I dosed with Cipro. Lucky my LFS still had a frag I had sold them a few months ago.
Had another super purple SPS go brownish.

Some stuff was not affected at all.

Let the DkH come down and letting the NO3 drift back down(didn’t really think that would make much of a difference at the time).
Gonna try to keep NO3 about 10 for now.