Yeah that’s why I diluted the nickel after some thought
As a seasoned pro , what would you suggest I try for iron dose ?
Could take months going down my method of .8 then send an icp ( comes back 0) go 1.6ml ( comes back 0……..
This is my general iron advice:
One Fergon tablet (ferrous gluconate) contains 27 mg of iron. Dissolve that in about 27 mL RO/DI (my recommendation, but other concentrations are OK, just don't dilute too much), the concentration is about 27 mg/27 ml ~ 1 mg/mL.
I dose ~1 mL to my tank with a volume of about 300 gallons ) once or twice a week.
That corresponds to a dose of about 1 ppb. Ten or a hundred times that is also apparent find since Red Sea recommended maintaining those higher levels.
here's an older recommendation of mine (which I think works out to about 0.2 ppb):
Iron in Reef Tanks: How Much and What Form?
Deciding how much iron to add is fairly easy because, in my experience, it doesn’t seem to matter too much. Presumably, once you add enough to eliminate iron as a limiting nutrient, extra iron does not apparently cause harm (at least that I’ve detected in my tanks or heard of from others). I selected a dose of about 0.1 to 0.3 mL of a solution containing 5 g of iron (as 25 g of ferrous sulfate heptahydrate) in 250 mL of water containing 50.7 g of sodium citrate dihydrate. This liquid is dosed 2-3 times per week to my system with a total water volume of about 250 gallons. This iron(II) citrate has turned brown and cloudy since I first made up the bottle years ago, suggesting that it is oxidizing to iron(III) and some is precipitating from solution, but I still use it. Over the past 4 years, I’ve dosed nearly all of the 5 grams of actual iron to my tank.
Now that may sound like a huge amount, and it is. It’s enough to bring 800 million gallons of completely depleted seawater up to the 0.000006 ppm level that I mentioned earlier for natural sea surface water. Still, I’ve not noticed any problem, do not know the steady state concentration, do not know how high of a solution concentration is actually optimal for my tank, do not know how much is biologically available by the mechanisms mentioned below, do not know how fast it is removed by skimming and other mechanisms, and do not know what would happen if I cut it back by a factor of 1,000.
All that I know is that microalgae has never been a problem since starting the iron, and I’ve not noticed anything negative that I could attribute to the iron (nor have I heard of any from others doing similar dosing). Still, I don’t keep all organisms available to the hobby, and if you do seem to get a negative reaction from something, I’d advise backing off on the dose or stopping completely.
