Dosing nitrate expectations?

[Rogergolf66]

ok I have a large very established reef 3 years old 90% sps. With out counting I would say over 500 corals. My setups have always been of the theory most nutrient export as possible is better. That being said I have a very large 4ft tall deltec skimmer and an 80gal refuge with 2 h380 running 16 hours a day. Well corals have grown ok. Most people say my system is impressive with growth and color but I know it could be better. Also I have always in all my tanks had a small cyno problem hence the max export setup. A couple years ago I bought the stuff to dose nitrate and phosphate but was scared to do it. I instead started feeding insane amounts of food and removed the filter socks. This did seem to help with color and the corals seem happy. The fish are fat and happy but I never got any nitrates to show on a test. No3 reads zero Red Sea pro. My po4 reads .036 triton.

So questions are
will the nitrate eliminat the cyno issues.
After dosing the nitrate will my po4 drop too?unwanted drop that is so will I have to dose po4 too
I currently don’t test for nitrate and po4 just watch the tank. I Will have to test both reg after dosing how often and for how long?
What to be careful for?
What things should I look for and expect?

 

[Kalibur2]

I had a zero nitrates and phosphates were .15. I had cyano all over the sand. I also have 80% sps so I started slowly dosing brightwells neonitro. Within 2 weeks it all went away. I am still dosing I’m at around 2 ppm nitrate now. Phosphates went down slightly. Everyday I increased my dose until I started seeing trace of nitrates. I also have Refugium. So far so good. Better colors.

 

[OPtasia]

Flow will probably eliminate your cyno issues. Get some good strong flow in the areas where it creeps up and clean it out with water changes if it's on your substrate.

Think of phosphates as a gate valve for algae growth. If you have high nitrates, it doesn't necessarily mean rampant coral and algae growth without opening up that gate valve. In other words, you could have 100+ ppm nitrates in your tank, but without SOME phosphates you won't have explosive growth. What's likely to happen is that you'll increase nitrates and that will encourage algae and coral growth limited by light and phosphate levels.

Get nitrate and phosphate test kits. I use Red Sea but the Hanna kits are great. You'll want to monitor your dosing so you can keep nitrates and phosphates at a desired level that you think is good for SPS health.

You haven't explained what you're dosing to raise nitrates and phosphates, so it's hard to anticipate what the pros and cons will be. What I would do is continue target feeding your SPS corals and feed them foods and amino acids that encourage good health and bright colors. For example, I like to soak reef roids nano in phyto feast from reef nutrition, then target feed via 10 ml. syringe twice a week.

Encouraging a healthy zooplankton population also helps. The phyto feast I use is loaded with five different strains of single celled algaes. These algaes are a fantastic amino acid rich food for NPS, SPS, LPS & Clams. I also add 2 ML of live rotifers to the tank twice a week. I have a small refugium in the center chamber of the bio-cube and we have tons of copepods living in the tank. All of these zooplankton make for a completely natural food source and make excellent detritus and algae eaters.

Red Sea also has an excellent coral color dosing program that's based on calcium consumption of your corals. As your stony corals grow and utilize calcium, they also use up other trace elements like potassium and iron. Red Sea color program doses 1 ML of four separate bottles every time you dose 2 part calcium.

 

[hart24601]

Many cyano species “claim to fame" so to speak is that they can take nitrogen from the atmosphere instead of having to use nitrate from the water. While it's not every tank that has cyano, many times when people have a few cyano outbreaks their nitrate is 0, hence the reason cyano grows because it can take atmospheric nitrogen and out compete other organisms in that environment. For many dosing nitrate clears up the cyano unless the tank is very poorly maintained. You might have a reduction in phosphate as well, although much less than nitrate. You could combat this by feeding more (adding phosphate along with nitrate if not wanting to drop PO4) or perhaps dialing back the photoperiod on the fuge. I would advise making only small changes, it has been my experience with these issues that there appears to be no change and then suddenly you have a drastic change overnight (like having 0 nitrates so people dose more and more then BOOM it rockets dramatically).

Be happy the lower nutrients have not caused a dino bloom.... Everytime my nutrients get low they start showing up.

 

[Rogergolf66]

Flow will probably eliminate your cyno issues. Get some good strong flow in the areas where it creeps up and clean it out with water changes if it's on your substrate.

Think of phosphates as a gate valve for algae growth. If you have high nitrates, it doesn't necessarily mean rampant coral and algae growth without opening up that gate valve. In other words, you could have 100+ ppm nitrates in your tank, but without SOME phosphates you won't have explosive growth. What's likely to happen is that you'll increase nitrates and that will encourage algae and coral growth limited by light and phosphate levels.

Get nitrate and phosphate test kits. I use Red Sea but the Hanna kits are great. You'll want to monitor your dosing so you can keep nitrates and phosphates at a desired level that you think is good for SPS health.

You haven't explained what you're dosing to raise nitrates and phosphates, so it's hard to anticipate what the pros and cons will be. What I would do is continue target feeding your SPS corals and feed them foods and amino acids that encourage good health and bright colors. For example, I like to soak reef roids nano in phyto feast from reef nutrition, then target feed via 10 ml. syringe twice a week.

Encouraging a healthy zooplankton population also helps. The phyto feast I use is loaded with five different strains of single celled algaes. These algaes are a fantastic amino acid rich food for NPS, SPS, LPS & Clams. I also add 2 ML of live rotifers to the tank twice a week. I have a small refugium in the center chamber of the bio-cube and we have tons of copepods living in the tank. All of these zooplankton make for a completely natural food source and make excellent detritus and algae eaters.

Red Sea also has an excellent coral color dosing program that's based on calcium consumption of your corals. As your stony corals grow and utilize calcium, they also use up other trace elements like potassium and iron. Red Sea color program doses 1 ML of four separate bottles every time you dose 2 part calcium.

Thx for the flood gate idea. Haven’t heard it explaining like that before. As far as flow goes. I did already add another 8,000gph worth of powerheads it didn’t help with the cyno. I have bb tanks so I have tons of flow since no worry of sand.

I do already have the test kits. Own a Hanna ultra low and the Red Sea pro kits. I just haven’t measured in years cause we’ll never anything to high and other then heavy feeding I wasn’t dosing any nitrate or po4.

I don’t do any direct feeding to the corals. Just a lot of light and let the fish poop

 

[Rogergolf66]

I had a zero nitrates and phosphates were .15. I had cyano all over the sand. I also have 80% sps so I started slowly dosing brightwells neonitro. Within 2 weeks it all went away. I am still dosing I’m at around 2 ppm nitrate now. Phosphates went down slightly. Everyday I increased my dose until I started seeing trace of nitrates. I also have Refugium. So far so good. Better colors.

Can u tell me how many ml. U started dosing or how many ppm u started doing each day and so on? I am also going to use that product. I already purchased it

 

[OPtasia]

Thx for the flood gate idea. Haven’t heard it explaining like that before. As far as flow goes. I did already add another 8,000gph worth of powerheads it didn’t help with the cyno. I have bb tanks so I have tons of flow since no worry of sand.

Flow should help, but it's realistic to expect that cynobacteria exists somewhere in our tanks at all times. The trick is keeping it in check. I do that with good flow, chemical filtration, a good CUC and water changes. If it gets to plague proportions and it's just overgrowing everything, chemiclean works, too.

I do already have the test kits. Own a Hanna ultra low and the Red Sea pro kits. I just haven’t measured in years cause we’ll never anything to high and other then heavy feeding I wasn’t dosing any nitrate or po4.

Make sure you get new ones with fresh reagents if it's been a few years. If you have the electric hanna testers, calibrate them.

I don’t do any direct feeding to the corals. Just a lot of light and let the fish poop

You might consider target feeding twice a week.

 

[Kalibur2]

Can u tell me how many ml. U started dosing or how many ppm u started doing each day and so on? I am also going to use that product. I already purchased it

My total water volume is around 120 gallons. I wanted to really take it slow and started with 5 ml I did that for 3 days but it did not register anything so I doubled it to 10 ml and finally close to .25 ppm on Red Sea pro kit. So I satarted adding 3 more ml everyday until I hit 21 ml which looks like sweet spot. I did notice a pink Acro prostrata was the only one that started to get brownish but has started to regain color. The only pain is the dosing by hand everyday. I have done 2 water changes in the past year and I was very impressed how the cyano cleared without me doing water change or taking it out. This was what worked. My flow was already high as can be before hand. I have sand moved all over lol. I hope I can start dosing few times a week and it stays with the higher nitrate. If I don’t test everyday then I will know if cyano comes back is that my nitrates are to low again. An affect on zero nitrates I lost all birds nest before dosing everything else was good

 

[marlinmon]

Can u tell me how many ml. U started dosing or how many ppm u started doing each day and so on? I am also going to use that product. I already purchased it

There's a link on another similar thread to a calculator on the plantedtank or something. Heed the warnings you read in other threads and go slow. My experience, and others here, is once you start dosing the no3 doesn't go up quickly, days pass, week goes by, and then all of the sudden big spike! I charted my no3 when I started dosing. I'll try to post it here when I have a chance. On actual product to use, I see folks moving from Spectracide to food grade potassium nitrate. I also see people have success with the neo nitrate product.

 

[Stephanielou1992]

Hi their,
I've just brought the neonitrate to start dosing into my tank can anyone tell me how much I should start off dosing, my tank is around 90us gallons and have alot of zoas in my tank. I can't get a trace of nitrate or phosphate in my tank.
ANY advice would be highly appreciated

 

[marlinmon]

Search plantedtank calculator for nitrate dosing. I recommend starting low and taking it slow. It can shoot up fast, especially if your tank isn’t consuming much nitrate. But before dosing I’d try turning off skimmer and removing gfo to get nitrates up

 

[MarinaP]

I dosed stump remover in a similar situation, but my tank is over 10 years old. It was a bad, bad idea. I’d rather deal with cyano than gha. Our tanks are very delicate systems, they balance out better without drastic interventions.

 

[markalot]

3 year old tank, with mature corals, so be careful what advice you act on. This is not a new tank, and it's not the cyano issues a lot of new tanks experience.

Flow is probably one issue, expect to be adding pumps as the corals grow larger ... do you have any pictures? Cyano will crop up when flow is minimal.

Nitrate dosing is fairly safe, but I recommend getting a dropper bottle and doing it via drops daily. I do one, sometimes 5, sometimes more. I forget a few days, do it again, forget again, etc. I've never seen an issue with nitrate as long as dosage is pretty low. I was able to get my nitrates up to 5 once, some color improved, some did not. I figure a few drops daily of my solution (it's unknown, sorry, CaNO3 + RODI and I lost the paper I wrote the amounts on) doesn't register nitrates in the tank but I do see benefits. I think my mixture is pretty strong. I made enough to last about 10 years.

If you have a shallow sandbed make sure you have some good critters in it. I would say stir every once and a while to kick the poop up, but I stopped stirring long ago. I figure my sandbed must be 50% critter crap at this point, if not more.