I meant that chasing numbers especially nano numbers is a bit difficult. I can't keep elegance alive to save my soul. I don't know what's wrong with my water. Would I do what you're doing to have one, probably not. There's so much that impacts water chemistry that we cannot control everything. We can manage things. But you're talking about pure control of specific elements.
I do not use water changes to manage trace elements. I simply dose them based on the bottle and dose 1-2 times a week. If things lose color or look a little droopy I'll dose more. But so far, this has worked for me.
As Randy indicated, algae consumes a lot of the trace elements. Whether it's algae on the rocks, in a scrubber, or in a refugium, there's algae in our tanks that consume minerals in much larger quantities than we dose.
I do maybe a water change every 6 months. If that. I do an ICP test once a year to check things. The result is always come back with some trace elements below normal and the rest normal.
I keep the corals I want alive with my current practices. My point is worry less about the actual numbers and more about how to make sure the animals are fed!
