Doing water and carbon filter change together ?

[Joshua J]

Hi, I’m relatively new at reefing. About 7 months in. I have a 32 gallon biocube. I checked my parameters today with my Hanna checkers. My nitrate is at 34.3 and my phosphate is greater than 0.90 (as high as the Hanna checker will read. I am planning on doing a larger water change tomorrow (10 gallons) I normally only do 5 every 1-2 weeks. I also noticed that my carbon filter looks extremely gross. Would it be doing too much if I do the large water change and go ahead and change out the carbon filter (I just changed it about 2 weeks ago) I also run the chemiclean elite, but it’s not quiet time to change it yet. Also run a skimmer. I dose with live copepods and dose with Live phytoplankton daily. Corals look fine. Salinity is at 1.026. I have Zoas and a good bit of LSC (mostly Acan Lords), one large war favite, and to ricordia mushrooms. I have two hair urchins, good set on invert CUC snails. 2 small clowns, 2 pajama cardinals, and a yellow watchman goby and pistol shrimp. I know I need to bring nitrate and phosphate down, but don’t wanna overdue and harm anything. Any tips would be helpful

 

[Reef.]

Use a dedicated gfo ditch the chemi clean, expensive for the amount you get.

Cleaning carbon at the same time as a W/C is fine, remember tho that carbon is not doing much at all to bring down nitrates or po4.

Your skimmer, water changes and gfo is what will make a difference.

 

[bushdoc]

Very few corals digest phytoplankton, so unless purpose of dosing phytoplankton is to feed zooplankton, you basically add nutrients ( lots of phosphates) to your reef.
I would decrease amount and frequency of feeding, do large water change and as reefer above suggested, use GFO.

 

[Joshua J]

Use a dedicated gfo ditch the chemi clean, expensive for the amount you get.

Cleaning carbon at the same time as a W/C is fine, remember tho that carbon is not doing much at all to bring down nitrates or po4.

Your skimmer, water changes and gfo is what will make a difference.

Thank you for the advice, I will definitely try that

 

[Joshua J]

Very few corals digest phytoplankton, so unless purpose of dosing phytoplankton is to feed zooplankton, you basically add nutrients ( lots of phosphates) to your reef.
I would decrease amount and frequency of feeding, do large water change and as reefer above suggested, use GFO.

Thank you. I didn’t know that. I will definitely cut the phytoplankton out.