Switched Carbon sources, fighting nitrates

kkgaskin90 · May 14, 2017

I switched from dosing vodka to vinegar in late February (had an extremely unsightly white slime outbreak). I am STILL fighting nitrates and can't seem to find a solution. It's to the point I'm having to do 20 gallon changes every week on a 75 just to slow losses. The water change will bring nitrates down from 20 to 5 or 10, then it's back up the next week. It's driving me insane. My skimmer also malfunctioned in this time, but I replaced that almost 2 weeks ago so we should be set there. Any advice or suggestions welcome.
75 gallon mixed reef
20 gallon sump
Coral Box D700 skimmer
2 Maxspect Gyres
GFO reactor
Dosing 16 ml vinegar (spread over 2 separate doses per day)

Today I was planning a 30 gallon change with complete sump cleaning... was going to make my back fuge section a rock section with a few pieces of live rock and some Seachem Matrix rock and dose the vinegar into that section. My front fuge section has chaeto.
I am absolutely overrun with hair algae and need to get it under control asap. It's overtaking corals faster than I can remove it.

Cory · May 15, 2017

Id set up an algae turf scrubber for this problem, or lots of gfo.

I had the ae problem with algae in the display until my ats took off.

Nitrates are the end result of food, fish poo, and ammonia production from fish. This indicates your sandbed and rock are full of rotting things.

mcarroll · May 15, 2017

You need to stop fighting the symptom (algae) in my opinion. Get to the bottom of why it's happening.

Is there any chance this is a pretty new tank?

Are you a pretty new reefkeeper?

What are your current test numbers for the tank?

How were you keeping the tank before the algae took over?

How much light are you putting into the tank?

This looks like it could be a tank that had too much bio-load added too fast.

Cutting down the bio-load would certainly help you get on top of things.

I would lay off of the carbon dosing, GFO and other nutrient reduction factors and hit the problem from other angles.

Hit the input side of the equation by cutting the bio-load down. An ATS is not a bad idea.

Randy Holmes-Farley · May 15, 2017

I do not think there is any chance that nitrate at 20 ppm is causing "loses".

16 mL of vinegar is not that much. Raising it should not be an issue, although I'd either spread out the doses with a dosing pump, or saturate it with calcium hydroxide to prevent the pH drop with manual addition.

kkgaskin90 · May 15, 2017

mcarroll said:
You need to stop fighting the symptom (algae) in my opinion. Get to the bottom of why it's happening.

Is there any chance this is a pretty new tank?

*The tank is 4 years old. The first 1.5 years it was FOWLR. The next year was LPS. Now it is mixed.*

Are you a pretty new reefkeeper?

*I'd consider myself new. 5 years in. The first tank was a Biocube. That got old pretty quickly.*

What are your current test numbers for the tank?

*SG-1.025
Temp-76
pH-7.8
NO3-5 (30 gallon change last night)
PO4-<0.03
KH-8.3 (I try to keep around 9.8 as my nitrates go up)
Cal-445
Mag-1440*

How were you keeping the tank before the algae took over?

*I have run the tank ULNS since August 2015. My nitrates usually hung around 0.2. The only other difference was I kept my Alk lower, around 7.8 when it was ULNS.*

How much light are you putting into the tank?

*I keep SPS, so a large amount. I'm not sure how you'd like me to answer that question. I have a ReefBreeder Photon 48 over the tank. The light cycle is 10 hours, maxing out at 65% blues and 40% whites.*

This looks like it could be a tank that had too much bio-load added too fast.

*I would respectfully disagree. I believe a series of events led to this disaster, but getting it under control has proven very difficult. I stocked EXTREMELY slow. The point of the tank was to keep leopard wrasses, and I finally added a trio them January 2016. In addition, I have a Flame Hawkfish, 2 clowns, Tomini Tang, Lyretail Anthias, Watchman Goby, and Lawnmower Blenny. I feed small amounts 1-2 times per day, and every bit is eaten (as I wanted to ensure my feeding habits were not contributing to the problem).*

Cutting down the bio-load would certainly help you get on top of things.

I would lay off of the carbon dosing, GFO and other nutrient reduction factors and hit the problem from other angles.

Hit the input side of the equation by cutting the bio-load down. An ATS is not a bad idea.

Randy Holmes-Farley said:
I do not think there is any chance that nitrate at 20 ppm is causing "loses".

*Apologies for the spelling error. I do not believe that the nitrate level is directly responsible for the losses, rather my inability to manage the nitrate level and the hair algae epidemic stemming from the excess nutrients is to blame. I have seen many successful tanks that run perfectly fine at 20 ppm Nitrate. When my initial spike happened, I had tissue loss that I believe was caused by my nitrates being too high for my KH (7.8). I could be wrong, but that was the only answer I could come up with. The tissue loss has stopped now that I have maintained closer to 9.8. The hair algae is bothering/overtaking some of my corals. My favia and red planet, most markedly, are slowly slowly losing more and more tissue.*

16 mL of vinegar is not that much. Raising it should not be an issue, although I'd either spread out the doses with a dosing pump, or saturate it with calcium hydroxide to prevent the pH drop with manual addition.

*I do have it on a dosing pump, so I can definitely spread out doses and continue to increase (I had stopped increasing when I realized my skimmer was malfunctioning-fearing that I was not able to properly skim out the amount that was needed). I have not heard of calcium hydroxide to prevent pH drop, but will look in to that as my pH runs pretty low normally. Would you cease water changes while increasing vinegar dosage?*

I absolutely have done other things to eliminate the source. This all started at the beginning of the year. Prior to this, my tank was running beautifully for over a year. My levels were steady. No problems. Then in November I had a mishap involving some dosing agents on a dosing pump that apparently cannot be used in conjunction with a pump. It caused a massive calcium spike and (not sure why) an ensuing phosphate spike. I am not the only one who had these exact issues but it did take a while for me to figure out the source. Once those two things got under control, the slime happened. Best I can tell, the slime was from over dosing vodka. The slime trapped lots of detritus and significantly reduced flow in my tank as it clogged up my pumps. It was an absolute nightmare. That is when the nitrates spiked. I switched to vinegar dosing. I did lots and lots of water changes and weekly cleaning to eradicate the slime. I added an additional Gyre to keep waste suspended instead of possibly settling in the rock work. I replaced my skimmer after discovering a faulty controller was sometimes functioning normally, sometimes not. I do not know how long this was going on.
The addition of the gyre and new skimmer have happened in the last 2 weeks. I added the lawnmower blenny at the same time as the skimmer. I have ordered some Marine Pure to couple with the Matrix rock in a rock filled section of fuge and have moved my dosing tube to that section. Last night I did a 30 gallon change and completely cleaned out the sump, which had plenty of detritus and was not functional on the fuge side for much other than pod reproduction as the macro had all but died off. Here is the sump now:

Water flows in to the left and right chambers. The right is divided into a front and back section, front with chaeto and the few bits of red macro I salvaged, back with rock rubble and Matrix. The left contains my skimmer. The water then flows to the center chamber which houses my return pump and back to the display.

I also plan on ordering more CUC as my numbers seem pretty low right now.