The goal of ammonia dosing is to not have corals need nitrate at all, but if nitrification is fast, it may be hard to attain that.
If you are concerned about taking to long to get nitrate up while slowly ramping up ammonia (so as to not overdose) you could always boost nitrate directly to 10 ppm, then continue to dose ammonia.
How much it will take to boost nitrate is impossible to say since it is not known how much ammonia your organisms will take up.
There's also the possibility to add a nitrate salt into the ammonium which can give good results.
I actually wanted to ask for your guidance on this, as chemistry is not a strong suit.
previously I was dosing the following:
500ml water
2g KNO3
10.36g of (NH4)HCO3
This gave me the ability to raise my NO3 to around 15-20 while dosing ammonium, theory was that this would assist the filamentous algaes in growing well in the tank to feed fish, I've since experimented with reducing this to:
500ml water
1g KNO3
10.36g of (NH4)HCO3
The questions I've got are:
How would I go about calculating the net change in amount of N, in some units, considering I've altered the formula?
How would I also calculate the amount (NH4)HCO3 needed to make up this shortfall?
How would I calculate the amount of N, or NO3 equivalent, this total solution were to add to 100 litres of water?
they're likely basic questions but I wanted to get the foundations explained properly because I feel this is useful for mixing up dosing solutions in the future
Yes, I’m dosing ammonia and phosphate and carbon dosing.
Carbon is in the form of formate since I use Tropic Marin All For Reef, and also in the form of alginate and various organic acids since I dose a pretty heavy amount of Reef Nutrition “feast” type refrigerated foods to my tank via auto feeder every day.
It took me a while to figure out that adding more Phytofeast and Oysterfeast to my tank every day was resulting in LESS dissolved nitrate and phosphate in the water. A bit counterintuitive until you understand how powerful carbon dosing and a good skimmer can be.
something like this was also noted by people using EasySPS by EasyReef, in an old thread on here.
it's a pump-dosable sps feed. There were anecdotal records of people having reductions in N and P despite feeding more to the tank, perhaps from increased coral metabolism?
