Every time I reduce my carbon dose...

[Potatohead]

I get a cyano outbreak on my sandbed.

I know that seems the opposite to what most people find, but this has been true for many months. I battled cyano for months, always thought it was from nopox dosing, so I backed it off at the first signs of cyano. It would just continue to get worse. I did this three or four times. Finally I just kept dosing and all the cyano went away after a couple weeks. This was a couple months ago.

Twice now since then because my nitrate is extremely low I have tried to back off my dose a bit and both times cyano appears on the sandbed. I can only presume it is utilizing the nitrogen because tests still show very little nitrate.

My corals (mainly SPS and some acans) are still doing pretty well, decent color and noticeable growth, but I'm concerned with running next to zero nitrate long term. I have to think there are some nutrients there otherwise my corals would be suffering. I would like to be able to back off my nopox dosing to get my nitrate to 1-2 ppm but I don't seem to be able to do that. Maybe if I go reeaalllyyy slowly? My phosphate is pretty consistent around .02.

Thanks for any ideas.

 

[Jason mack]

How Many fish do you have ? I would try adding a couple more fish .!i added a yellow doctor and a copperband To mine my nitrates went from 1-2 ppm To 5-10 ppm ..

 

[Potatohead]

That's not a bad idea. I have only five fish totalling about 12 inches. I had six but my Flame Hawk jumped the other day . My tank is 32x24x20 with a decent sized sump, about 70 gallons total.

 

[Jason mack]

Ok so room enough !!! And its always Nice too have more fish swimming around Maybe a couple of blue/ green chromis

 

[Jason mack]

Plus more Detritus for your corals !!!!

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

It sounds like the bacteria feeding on the NOPOX are taking up something else that also limits the cyano grow. Maybe a trace metal of some sort.

Do you do water changes or dose trace elements, and if you do, do you see any connection between these and the cyano?

 

[Potatohead]

It sounds like the bacteria feeding on the NOPOX are taking up something else that also limits the cyano grow. Maybe a trace metal of some sort.

Do you do water changes or dose trace elements, and if you do, do you see any connection between these and the cyano?

I do water changes, about 8-10% every ten days or so. I use the Balling Light method which contains trace elements in the three solutions. The only other thing is a very small amount (1-2 ml) of Seachem Reef Plus once or twice a week which is mainly aminos but also has a few trace elements. Also a few drops of MB7 a couple times a week. When I dose these things with the higher nopox dose I do not notice more cyano growth. I did try to increase feedings to get nitrate up, but that just led to higher phosphate and some hair algae. I don't know if it is related but I started my tank with about 3/4 dry rock and 1/4 live rock. The live rock has no algae growth at all so I believe my dry rock has some bound up phosphate and that could be true of the sand also. The rock is about 18 months old now.

When I was dosing 1.8 ml of nopox per day (not that much) the rock and sand was very clean. I dropped it down to 1 ml over the course of about ten days and slowly cyano is coming back, and here we are today. I have been thinking about running the tank around 1.6 - 1.8 ml per day and starting to dose more aminos and trace elements/organics (Fauna Marin Color Elements to be exact). If this is the way the tank wants to work I don't really want to fight it, but also I want what is best for my corals. As stated they seem to be doing fairly well, I get noticeable growth although not particularly fast. Color is decent and I wouldn't really say they are paling other than my Cali Tort and it's pretty minor and the thing is still growing fine. They must be getting nutrition from somewhere.

I have also considered dosing nitrate but to do so while carbon dosing seems to maybe not be the best course of action.

 

[PatW]

You could try just adding nitrate by dosing spectracide stump remover which you can get at Lowes or Home Depot. With the right balance of dosing spectracide and carbon dosing, you can run nitrates at a low level like 1 ppm.

 

[Potatohead]

You could try just adding nitrate by dosing spectracide stump remover which you can get at Lowes or Home Depot. With the right balance of dosing spectracide and carbon dosing, you can run nitrates at a low level like 1 ppm.

Do you not think this would just get consumed really quickly?

The thing that sucks is you cannot buy potassium nitrate or sodium nitrate in Canada. I can buy Seachem Flourish nitrogen, though.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

That Seachem product is fine, although monitoring it by nitrate measurement is not perfect since it is not all nitrate.

 

[Iceman86]

Do you not think this would just get consumed really quickly?

The thing that sucks is you cannot buy potassium nitrate or sodium nitrate in Canada. I can buy Seachem Flourish nitrogen, though.

Ebay or amazon is where I get mine without issues

 

[Potatohead]

Ok, I'll check out Amazon.

It seems weird to dose nitrate while carbon dosing though. Seems that you would have to keep increasing both doses over time, which doesn't seem wise. I guess it could work if the bacteria growth is limited by carbon and not nitrate.