Phosphates Zero - What Product to Use

[Dburr1014]

There is a thing called clean dirty water. When you dose there is no debris floating around from waste, its pure. When you over feed to get your numbers up there tends to be continuous algae issues. I aim for No3: 30 and Po4:10. If i did not dose i would be running a ULN (ultra low nutrient) tank. I run SPS LPS Zoas under the same parameters. I feed my corals maybe once a month if i remember.

Po4: 10??
Or 0.1?
Mine is 0.05 to 0.12 always.

OP, if you are only feeding flakes, pellets, roids, and have algae, you have po4.
You are also carbon dosing.
IMO, to fix this, you need to dose po4 while carbon dosing and add more cuc. Nitrates won't lower cuz the bacteria also needs the po4 the algae is stealing from them.
Or, stop carbon dosing, do water changes to lower nitrates. Then work on the algae with cuc.
Again, IMO.

 

[TankCandy]

Po4: 10??
Or 0.1?
Mine is 0.05 to 0.12 always.

OP, if you are only feeding flakes, pellets, roids, and have algae, you have po4.
You are also carbon dosing.
IMO, to fix this, you need to dose po4 while carbon dosing and add more cuc. Nitrates won't lower cuz the bacteria also needs the po4 the algae is stealing from them.
Or, stop carbon dosing, do water changes to lower nitrates. Then work on the algae with cuc.
Again, IMO.

Good catch. Your are correct .10

 

[jose hernandez]

reef roids 4 sure

 

[RaymondL]

So I'm guessing randy wrote this article some 20 years ago when ULNS was all the rage. We all know better now, and that .03 very well maybe 0 even with the hanna ULR testers(margin of error for the tester).

I would never keep phosphates under .03, thats just inviting dino's., and starving corals of nutrients.

IMHO.

The Hanna checker reported zero, so I got a Salisfert Phosphate test, and could easily see that the Phosphate was in between 0.01 and 0.03 as it had a slight green tinge to it. That means then the Hanna reported incorrectly, or because of the allowable margin of error, it showed 0, which in fact it isn't.

In my case, the way of testing using reagents outperformed the other means of testing.