Nitrate and Phosphate imbalance

WesleyC · Nov 9, 2017

I read it quite a few times now, and people trying to fix the imbalance. What bad about the imbalance? Can someone make an example what would happen when there are nitrate but low phosphate or the other way around?

Flippers4pups · Nov 9, 2017

A lot of this is based on the “redfield ratio”. In short, for us reef tank keepers, having more N03 than P04 is desirable.

Randy Holmes-Farley · Nov 9, 2017

I do not generally consider imbalance or balance to be the key (I can’t even imagine how that could be true), but keeping each independently in the right range is the goal.

For example, suppose nitrate is 0.00001 ppm, does that mean an optimal phosphate level is 0.0000001 ppm? Why would that be?

Same if nitrate is 150 ppm. Is the optimal phosphate 3 ppm? Why not 0.3 ppm? Or 0.05 ppm?