Is Dosing Necessary?

[mike550]

Okay. Very much a newbie Q. I've been at this for about seven months with a 120G reefer. My levels all seem pretty reasonable (salinity 1.025, Alk 8.2, Phosphate 0.00, Ca 430, Mg 1290, nitrates 10-15 ppm). My tank has 9 fish (2 clowns, blue tang, dwarf flame angel, rabbitfish, goby, blue chromis, and a blennie -- all less then 3" in size) along with a few corals and a blue linckia sea star, tuxedo urchin, and BTA. Couple of questions / thoughts.

First, besides water changes and feeding less, what else should I be doing to reduce nitrates? I'd like to add more fish but not sure if I can handle the additional bio-load.

Second, a couple of folks said that I might want to consider dosing for Alk (I manually adjust with soda ash) and magnesium. So my question is whether dosing is really something that I'll need to do over the long term (and buy a "nice" doser) or is this something where a simple BRS doser / timer combo will hold me for a while? I'd rather not buy something inexpensive today only to have to replace within a year.

Thanks in advance for all of your thoughts!

 

[splitting_lanes]

Are you running a refugium? That will help with most or all nitrate export.

I’ve run for many years without dosing, but in the end, ph/Alk/cal always drops. I’m using a litermeter and dosing kalk, it is a great solution to the problem.

 

[madweazl]

You can typically get by with water changes while the corals are small but they'll reach a point where you just cant reliably dose it manually (my tank was using 2 dKh per day).

 

[mike550]

@splitting_lanes and @madweazl thanks for your replies. Not running a refugium but am running a skimmer (Bubble Magus Curve 7). As for alk changes it looks like a drop about 0.3dkH every few days -- but I'm also adding soda ash to the RO water in my ATO. So I haven't quite got that balanced out right. I'll also look at liter meter and dosing ideas.

 

[lapin]

Dont worry about the dosing. Water changes should keep up until you have a lot of SPS,LPS. Soda ash will work also for a long time.

Nitrates:
Yes feeding less will help. You will need some sort of export besides the skimmer. Some people use carbon dosing as a way to increase bacteria that might help bring it down. Also vac the sand bed and blowing. off rocks can help.

 

[Jenuvio]

Did you end up dosing?
How's the tank coming along?

Remember that nitrates don't go down once your phosphate has reached zero. It's impossible.

 

[PatW]

At .3 DKH every ”few” days, it depends.

First, I am not sure what “few”, means. I guess anywhere between 3-7. So you lose .1 to .05 DKH per day.

Right now, you can address that by measuring ALK and dosing soda ash once or twice per week.

I suppose water changes would work but you would have to do them about weekly and pretty consistently. Dosing just seems easier.

Or you could try adding kalkwasser to you autotopoff reservoir. I never had luck with kalkwasser but it is a favored method.

Right now it would seem pointless to add a doser but that is just my bent. You can if you want. It just depends on whether you like automating things or not.

Using dosers gets to be a more viable and necessary solution when the ALK consumption starts to approach 1 DKH per day. And you might never reach that level.

 

[lion king]

I love the brs dosers, at this point your numbers look good. As you add more corals you may find the need, or just want to add a doser or 2. Mg stays pretty stable so most can easily keep up manually. If you start adding lps, keep a close eye on your alk, in the beginning I lost a bunch before I caught my low alk problem. When you really fill that tank in, you'll never keep up with ca and alk with water changes. Unless you looking to get into sps your nitrates are fine, If you did want to control them more, look into macro algae options; refugium, reactor, etc.