Nutrient Consistency

[ekandler]

My system seems to have a mind of it's own with nutrients. I have a 90 gallon system with a healthy refugium, eshopps s-120 skimmer and a KLIR filter roller. I previously fed frozen to my fish daily, but in the past month I've turned it down to every other day after redoing some rock in my tank to try and combat my nutrient rise with the loss in bacteria until the rock is cured. Regardless, over the past year you can see my nutrients have fluctuated quite a bit but my routine is pretty consistent. My refugium is on a timer, skimmer runs 24/7, KLIR doing it's thing, and feeding on the same schedule, yet my nutrients go wild. If stuff skyrockets, i respond with a water change or brighwell PhosE as necessary, but i try to let it do it's thing. It just feels like things are going wild, more wild than they should be. Is this normal, or is something up?

 

[blaxsun]

I assume these are nitrates and phosphates? Here are mine for comparison (I'm probably not testing as frequently as I should be), and the tank is only 6 months old. I had the expected spike after the tank was established while the rock fully populated, then another in August when I was medicating for most of the month. My parameters have been really stable for the past 3 months.

The highest my nitrates have ever been is 15ppm and my phosphates only briefly spiked to 0.4ppm in August when I had my GFO reactor off.