Greetings fellow reefers.
I STOPPED DOING WATER CHANGES 3 MONTHS AGO hum... I'll explain further on...
More than one month has past since I installed the new Radions G4, and it's time for some comparison shots of coral growth over 1month. On the 14th of December I took a lot of topdown shots and today I tried to take the same picture from the same angle to have a good idea of growth and color.
Before I start posting pictures... A bit of background story of what I've been doing so far.
On the 6th of June I started following the Triton Method, coming from the Zeovit method(previous tank) I had no idea what I was getting into ahah... But it was alright because on this system I was doing a different approach, I didn't want to dose stuff with fancy names (this time I leave the fancy names just for the corals hehe) I wanted to learn about the elements and what was the consumption of trace elements on a normal tank... So I went with the Triton method.
In the beginning I was trying to get a stable Kh, but it was a bit hard the system had something unblanced and the corals were not looking as good as I liked, but I keeped doing what I was doing.... Water changing even more and finally the Kh was stable.
Then it was time to send a triton test to check how was the elements, so I did and found out that even with all the water changes I had a few elements missing and very low potassium and strontium plus another ~6 elements very low or missing if I remember correctly, I keeped on doing water changes... But still there was something missing so I sent another triton test and even with my correction doses plus the maintainance doses the results were not satisfying.
On one of my forum threads I met Orz and he told me that he has not done a single water change for 12+ months and when he sent me a picture of his tank looking like a zeovit tank I couldn't believe it... Still I was afraid of not doing water changes(new concept/I always did water changes) also because at the time I had a very small refuge, this being one of the main requirements for nutrient exportation I had to do something, so I managed to raise my algae volume while I was waiting for the Seadreams sump and decided to STOP making water changes.
It was being impossible to calculate elements consumptions while doing water changes at the same time, I send a NSW sample to analyse everything looked good but then we reached a conclusion that NSW values will probably change seasonally so calculations with NSW variables were too complicated to keep up with, I felt like doing a water changes was actually making me spend more ml of trace elements trying to fix the water change unbalanced from my tank values.
On the first couple of months I keeped a close eye on the nutrient levels I started with a Po4 of 0.02 Hanna (~0.07 Triton normally) and No3 0.25ppm Red Sea Pro test so I had a bit of high Po4, anyway this reading was gone when I raised my chaeto algae volume, a friend of mine got me around 1.5L of chaeto and after a couple of weeks I was reading Po4 0.00 Hanna (by experience I believe this is 0.02 on Triton), No3 0.00ppm on Red Sea Pro test kit... This was very low so lately I started noticing the corals more pastel with a crazy polyp extention.
I've been feeding frozen food for long time now, one washed cube per day and also on alternated days frozen Ocean Nutrition Microplankton.
So on the 4th of January I reached 3months with no water changes just propper elements tuning by calculating doses with the help of the Triton tests and the system is now veryyy stable.
- Correction… I had a problem on the 23rd of Dez with my ATO unit and 20-40L of RO water went into the system in 48h, by the time I noticed it I had my salinity come down from 1.026 to 1.021 in 48hours so it was 3am that day and I made a 50L water change to raise the salinity and the elements
and on the following day another water change of 70L to raise another salinity point… and stopped at 1.023… started to topup with NSW until the salinity was 1.026 again, this messed up all of my fine tuning I had been doing for the past 2months and a half… but the system looks OK, not as good as before but still looks good. I sent a water sample to Triton on last Monday and hopefully I'll have the results next week.
At the moment I have crystal clear water, using only Triton Carbon and still no need to use any GFO. The corals are growing a lot with good colors and very good polyp extention.
Some final toughts, in the beginning I was afraid of stopping the water changes but by analysing the results I noticed that I could hold the system just by maintaining the trace elements and controlling the nutrients… at the moment I feel that my system is really stable (apart from the RO disaster). Going back and thinking about my previous system with KZ I find that it's also a good method but needs different husbandries like any other method out there it consists on putting trace elements in "blindly" and make lots of water changes to keep the system stable just my personal opinion…. I also reached the conclusion that doing only water changes is impossible to maintain certain trace elements unless you do massive water changes almost dailly, at the moment with a relatively low coral load I notice a LOT of trace consumption.
This is why I'm loving what I'm currently doing with the ability to analyse and get a feel of what's happening with thmany different ele trace elements.
So let's see some growth photos... these photos were taken on the 14th of December, the new G4 Radions were installed on the 29th of November, so let's see the coral growth and corlor between 14th December and 14th of January.
Note that between this period I raised intensity from 70% to 80% and also raised warm white from 5% to 10%, also lowered the nutrients to make the corals more pastel like... maybe a challenge to make them look like "zeo" colors
humm
Pedro.
hhahhaah
joking.... I like to have a lot of light all around 
