Originally I was feeding lightly once a day and running chemipure Blue as well as doing a large wc once a week. I was still under the assumption nutrients were a big no no. I had no3 present but never had po4.
Then I started feeding benereef which also doses bacteria so no3 bottomed out as well. And at some point during all this I had a little cyano and overreacted like an idiot and added a skimmer. Long story short it wasn't long before dinos took over.
To combat them I researched and decided going dirty was the answer so I started feeding nls pellets 2x a day as well as reef roids 1x. I couldn't get po4 up so I started feeding rods food as well once a day. I then started to see other algae and kept with this routine. I didn't clean the glass or do any water changes until I finally had detectable po4. This took 3 weeks.
When I finally cleaned the glass dinos were gone and the corals that weren't already hit hard by dinos looked better than ever. I now realize I was starving them.
Now I just aim to keep no3 at or below 20ppm and po4 below 0.1. And that's just to limit excess algae/cyano. I think ive found the balance to do so by continuing the heavy feeding, running a skimmer, but no chemical filtration(though I did run chemi Blu a few days to get po4 back under 0.1), and doing around a 15% weekly wc.
