this would tell me that your nutrients are rising.... at least from what i have exp. is tons of feather dusters in high nutrient tanks and very little to none in ulns... just been my exp.
My tank was neglected for about 9 months due to my work schedules and just being busy. I threw a new lighting system on it by switching from MH to VHO and my corals began to fade. Instead of testing the water, I just figured it was the lighting, but what really was happening was the tank was beginning to crash. Salinity was low, Alk was low, and nitrates and PO4 were high. I thought about selling everything before it all died, but then realized this isn't the economy to try to sell everything off so I started doing water changes. After 6 50g water changes I started to stabilize. I did a water change every 3 days for the first 6 water changes. At this time corals started to stop receding and were surviving.
My buddy John(uberfrags) recommended that I throw a reactor on immediately. He claimed that all of his tanks were doing phenomenal and that Sissy was using them on all of their fish breeding systems with no ill effects and that even the fry survival rate was up. So I ordered one and within 10 days my system began to flourish. Algae died back rapidly, coraline algae rebounded quickly, and the corals that I removed for safe keeping were returned only to look better than ever before. After 2 months of using the reactor I have had absolutely no reading on the nitrate kit, but expect it to be less than 10ppm as i am not using a low range kit. PO4 is 0ppm on the Hanna Photometer.
Knowing from doing the ULNS with Zeo-vit before I new the tank would start to need to be fed as nutrients continued drop so I added the automatic feeder with no ill effects and I feed live baby brine every night after lights out. Again, no increase in nitrate, no increase in algae, and no increase in phyto on the glass. I go about a week before I develop a film on the glass compared to every other day before.
I think using the pellets with water changes, and with a strong skimmer have been one of the best system enhancements I have seen over the last 25 years of growing corals. I could only imagine how many more corals would of survived the early days of the hobby if we would of had access to the science and products that we have today.
