Ready to give up… please help with nitrates and phos

[tazee]

I have had a FOWLR tank for a few years… I recently just started adding corals. Only 3 so far. I was dealing with high phos so I added chemi pure elite and that took it down to 0.10 and I stopped using it. A couple of days ago I rescaped my tank. Broke down the live rock and just changed how aquascape looked.

24 hours later my corals weren’t looking so good so I tested everything. My nitrates are at 0. My phos at 0.03
I am completely confused on what’s causing the low nitrates. I dosed neo nitro to get it up. It went to 0.8 and now back at 0.1 this morning. I had a little bit of gha and now it’s increasing every morning. I am feeding more to get nitrates up with no luck.

My set up is a 20g IM tank with filter sock, filter floss . 2 clown fishes, 2 nassarius snails, 2 hermit crabs and 1 one bumble bee snail. That’s it
I have used Hannah salifert api test kits to cross check and all are showing 0 nitrates

I’d really appreciate some help and soon please.

Rest of my levels are as follows
Sailinity - 1.024ppt
8dkh alkalinity
7.8 ph
400 calcium
0 nitrite
0 ammonia

 

[unclejed]

You could try a bag (proper amount) of Phosguard or something similar. It all should run it's course eventually.










9

 

[TX_REEF]

nassarius and bumble snails are both carnivores, they don't eat algae.

Turbo snails are the best algae eating herbivores

Astrea are great but I'd recommend trochus first, they just seem to get around the tank faster, can more easily right themselves if they fall upside down, and can reproduce in our tanks

To OP, I'd also look into getting Ph into the 8-8.3 range and salninity up to 1.026.

 

[tazee]

You could try a bag (proper amount) of Phosguard or something similar. It all should run it's course eventually.










9

My phosphates is at 0.03 … by adding phosguard wouldn’t that decrease the phosphates more? What would decreasing phosphates do in this situation?

 

[sixty_reefer]

Are you adding any coral food?

 

[tazee]

Are you adding any coral food?

No coral food. There’s only 3 corals and I only spot feed one.

 

[tazee]

Correct, 6 not counting the nassarious. Some will recommend more but add slowly.

You said you already have coral and they are fine correct?

Unless something really goes south most corals are ok. I actually prefer to build my tank and start it with corals now. No dosing or anything needed. But you already have bacteria establishing. Corals add very little waste.

There are certain coral that are a bit sensitive like most SPS. But your LPS are best options as they carry bacteria in on their structures or Softies if attached. If looking to do SPS wait a bit

Hello again,

I have added the clean up crew as you suggested and they’re busy eating all the algae..

I’m guessing now nitrate would have a chance to increase a little so my corals open up again? Is that correct? Please let me know what else if anything I should be doing to get this tank to thrive now. Thank again for your help

 

[Salty_Northerner]

If you want to clean up that gha and feed your tank id highly recommend using Tropic Marin plus NP. It adds nitrogen and phosphate that the nuisance algae can't use. If you use felt socks I'd change them to mesh to allow nutrients to rise. I've consistently been battling low nutrients and when I was adding reefroids and Brightwell neophos all it did was pollute the water. I've learned to ignore testing no3 as nitrogen won't be detected by Hanna checker, I'm reading .2 no3 and Po4 on the other hand I'm getting a steady .03 and the tank hasn't looked better since omitting Brightwell neophos and reefroids and using mesh.

My sand bed looks brand new since using Plus NP. Corals are colouring up nicely and I'm only added 1.2ml a day.

The more Brightwell you add the faster the algae is going to suck it up. It took me a bit to wrap my head around it but once I've started dosing plus NP I've done questioning my reef tank. It just works

 

[zerozero]

All taken in white light

You've moved swiftly to your credit. Manual removal is still a must.

One thing I noticed looking back on your photos is that there are reflections from windows. Is the tank in sunlight for any period of time? The GHA will love that if it is.

The other thing about light is that your corals and fish can manage with the blue spectrum of light, but the GHA will thrive if your using the full spectrum (white) light for long period of time.

What light are you using? Are you able to control it's intensity?

 

[tazee]

You've moved swiftly to your credit. Manual removal is still a must.

One thing I noticed looking back on your photos is that there are reflections from windows. Is the tank in sunlight for any period of time? The GHA will love that if it is.

The other thing about light is that your corals and fish can manage with the blue spectrum of light, but the GHA will thrive if your using the full spectrum (white) light for long period of time.

What light are you using? Are you able to control it's intensity?

So there’s a ton of windows in the house but no direct sunlight hits the tank. In the later afternoon I pull up the curtains so no direct light ever really hits the tank.

I’m using AI prime with the saxby template. Let me know if I need to make any changes to that please

 

[KTTX]

Try and maintain No3 between 5 and 12, phosphate between .04 and .09

Never zero.

If the GHA doesn't start to go away after a few days of manual removal, borrow or rent from LFS a seahare...it will clear up that GHA in a few days.

 

[Glowurm]

I have had a FOWLR tank for a few years… I recently just started adding corals. Only 3 so far. I was dealing with high phos so I added chemi pure elite and that took it down to 0.10 and I stopped using it. A couple of days ago I rescaped my tank. Broke down the live rock and just changed how aquascape looked.

24 hours later my corals weren’t looking so good so I tested everything. My nitrates are at 0. My phos at 0.03
I am completely confused on what’s causing the low nitrates. I dosed neo nitro to get it up. It went to 0.8 and now back at 0.1 this morning. I had a little bit of gha and now it’s increasing every morning. I am feeding more to get nitrates up with no luck.

My set up is a 20g IM tank with filter sock, filter floss . 2 clown fishes, 2 nassarius snails, 2 hermit crabs and 1 one bumble bee snail. That’s it
I have used Hannah salifert api test kits to cross check and all are showing 0 nitrates

I’d really appreciate some help and soon please.

Rest of my levels are as follows
Sailinity - 1.024ppt
8dkh alkalinity
7.8 ph
400 calcium
0 nitrite
0 ammonia

Do you have a sump? PODS, PODS, PODS and maybe a few trochus snails.... build up that bio-load. Healthy microfauna is probably the best CUC going.

Dont use chemicals to fix this, more often than not they are the cause of rapid change, lets see if nature cant resolve it before we dose stuff.

 

[zerozero]

So there’s a ton of windows in the house but no direct sunlight hits the tank. In the later afternoon I pull up the curtains so no direct light ever really hits the tank.

I’m using AI prime with the saxby template. Let me know if I need to make any changes to that please

Ok, that's good that you're avoiding direct sunlight on to your tank as much as possible.

I watched a BRS video on (I think mistakes beginners to reef tanks) make, and no. 1 was constantly fiddling with the tank. I know I was guilty of this too.

In your OP you mentioned that you re-scaped your tank, which is absolutely fine, of course. But even if your new scape (which looks great with loads of horizontal surface for future coral placement) is better for your coral there will be a period of adjustment for them; They'll withdraw a bit and not look happy. And then, given stability, they adapt.

Lighting
I'd heard of the Saxby settings for an AI Prime and looked at them to fine tune my own lights from a different brand. Our lights turn on at 7:00 (Just blues). I removed red and green LEDs entirely because I want to give no encouragement to algae of any kind. The full spectrum whites turn on at 12:00, ramp up to "full power" at 20% at 15:00 for two hours and are gone again by 19:00. I have macro algae in the tank and it's doing ok. But algae are not the priority; it's all about the corals. The Clownfish don't care . Set you lights and then leave them alone for two months.

Copepods
Will happily endorse what @Glowurm said above. I've been dosing Phytoplankton for a few weeks now, and introduced coped pods last week. This week the tank is teeming with Ampipods. The microfauna are eating algae but are also food for the coral. It's a win-win. I think copepods are a great solution to algae management.

Apologies if I've waffled on here. It always bothers me when a fellow reefer feels like they want to give up. Good luck!

 

[tazee]

Do you have a sump? PODS, PODS, PODS and maybe a few trochus snails.... build up that bio-load. Healthy microfauna is probably the best CUC going.

Dont use chemicals to fix this, more often than not they are the cause of rapid change, lets see if nature cant resolve it before we dose stuff.

No sump. Trying to this with the least amount of extra things that I can

 

[tazee]

Ok, that's good that you're avoiding direct sunlight on to your tank as much as possible.

I watched a BRS video on (I think mistakes beginners to reef tanks) make, and no. 1 was constantly fiddling with the tank. I know I was guilty of this too.

In your OP you mentioned that you re-scaped your tank, which is absolutely fine, of course. But even if your new scape (which looks great with loads of horizontal surface for future coral placement) is better for your coral there will be a period of adjustment for them; They'll withdraw a bit and not look happy. And then, given stability, they adapt.

Lighting
I'd heard of the Saxby settings for an AI Prime and looked at them to fine tune my own lights from a different brand. Our lights turn on at 7:00 (Just blues). I removed red and green LEDs entirely because I want to give no encouragement to algae of any kind. The full spectrum whites turn on at 12:00, ramp up to "full power" at 20% at 15:00 for two hours and are gone again by 19:00. I have macro algae in the tank and it's doing ok. But algae are not the priority; it's all about the corals. The Clownfish don't care . Set you lights and then leave them alone for two months.

Copepods
Will happily endorse what @Glowurm said above. I've been dosing Phytoplankton for a few weeks now, and introduced coped pods last week. This week the tank is teeming with Ampipods. The microfauna are eating algae but are also food for the coral. It's a win-win. I think copepods are a great solution to algae management.

Apologies if I've waffled on here. It always bothers me when a fellow reefer feels like they want to give up. Good luck!

Hey man I really appreciate all your advice. Thank you so much. I’m going to see how I can edit the saxby template and get rid of green/red light from it.

Yeah I promised myself I’m not gonna touch the tank and let it do its thing so there’s stability

I’m going to see how I can implement pods into my aio system with out a sump. More research to be done now!

 

[unclejed]

My phosphates is at 0.03 … by adding phosguard wouldn’t that decrease the phosphates more? What would decreasing phosphates do in this situation?

Absolute 0 phosphate is our goal, although rarely achieved. Reducing/ridding phosphate is a proactive measure. Everything "bad" for our water quality feeds on phosphate. My phosphate kit reads near zero and yet I recently started the green hair algae. Brown diatoms came and went and Red cyno was eliminated by use of Blue Life USA Cyano Rx Aquarium Treatment, Red Cyno. My tank is 4 mos. old. The algae, cyno and other maladies of the aquarium are indeed mostly inevitable. Be patient and keep up the good fight, all will be well.

​

 

[Knucker]

I would say it's all the algae eating the nutrients in the tank. I try to avoid adding algae killing chemicals to a tank because Coral have their own Algae. I would grab an herbivore that loves that kind of algae. It looks like hair algae. A court jester goby is a good choice. They are small easy to care for and eat hair algae in the wild.

 

[tazee]

Absolute 0 phosphate is our goal, although rarely achieved. Reducing/ridding phosphate is a proactive measure. Everything "bad" for our water quality feeds on phosphate. My phosphate kit reads near zero and yet I recently started the green hair algae. Brown diatoms came and went and Red cyno was eliminated by use of Blue Life USA Cyano Rx Aquarium Treatment, Red Cyno. My tank is 4 mos. old. The algae, cyno and other maladies of the aquarium are indeed mostly inevitable. Be patient and keep up the good fight, all will be well.

​

Yeah so I started using phosguard to lower the phosphate. It was at 0.09… hopefully with the decrease in phosphate and some increase in nitrate my tank can stabilize

 

[Knucker]

get a strong clean up crew to chew through that Algae and you should be fine. Algae will bottom out your nutrients quickly. I said Court Jester Goby before. another is a Lawnmower blenny.

Just don't ever give up. I promise you will regret it later on in life.

Yeah so I started using phosguard to lower the phosphate. It was at 0.09… hopefully with the decrease in phosphate and some increase in nitrate my tank can stabilize

 

[Ben's Pico Reefing]

Hello again,

I have added the clean up crew as you suggested and they’re busy eating all the algae..

I’m guessing now nitrate would have a chance to increase a little so my corals open up again? Is that correct? Please let me know what else if anything I should be doing to get this tank to thrive now. Thank again for your help

Sorry for late reply. Just do changes slowly to avoid over correction. Some good advice in here and different approaches. With a cleanup crew, you are on your way. May need to replace or add as time goes and how algae is.

 

[Rappa]

Absolute 0 phosphate is our goal, although rarely achieved. Reducing/ridding phosphate is a proactive measure. Everything "bad" for our water quality feeds on phosphate. My phosphate kit reads near zero and yet I recently started the green hair algae. Brown diatoms came and went and Red cyno was eliminated by use of Blue Life USA Cyano Rx Aquarium Treatment, Red Cyno. My tank is 4 mos. old. The algae, cyno and other maladies of the aquarium are indeed mostly inevitable. Be patient and keep up the good fight, all will be well.

​

No offense meant here at all... Absolute zero seems to be the old way of reefing. Most successful reefers will tell you that you NEED some level of PO4, above .03. When you get under .03, you run the risk of bottoming out your nutrients and crashing your tank. That will bring along with it cyanno issues, then Dino's take hold and you can have real problems. Corals need some levels of Nitrate and Phosphate to thrive, as they consume both. I think many reefer's will agree that a goal of nitrate around 10 and Phosphate around .1 is just fine for new-ish tank. Some of the nicest tanks I have ever seen have nutrient levels that are so high, they don't even test them anymore. Of course, those tanks are well established and have a stable bio-load to control nuisance algae. The problem is, when our tanks are new, we feel like we need to keep these numbers as low as possible. In essence, we do want to keep them low-ish, but never absolute zero. There are so many factors that make the nutrient numbers jump around. With my latest tank (225G), it took me over a year to get some stability, and I truly believe that it is due to the fact that we cannot use actual Live-Rock anymore. I never had these issues back in the day when I got figi live-rock direct from the ocean. I think that the newer way of aquascaping with "dead rock" such as the Liferock products and maybe even Marco rock (I used both), holds a ton of PO4 and then releases/leaches it out into the water like crazy, for a long period of time. I was chasing numbers all over the place for many months before I just decided to leave it alone and let it work itself out. I went from having zero PO4 to .99 in a month. Then I went crazy trying to eliminate PO4 and ended up zero'd out, which created way more issues. I couldn't keep SPS alive, LPS like torch corals would be happy, then die off, and I got a GHA bloom on almost 100% of my rock, that I'm only recently feeling like I have got ahold of and 90% beat the GHA. Almost a year of manual removal sessions, along with a cleanup crew. I had 9 Tuxedo and Pincushion Urchins in my tank, which are awesome for hair algae. A few have died off, but I still have 5 or so remaining.

To wrap up this long winded post (sorry!)... Do less rather than more. Let the tank simmer, let the rock leach nuitrients out, do your small regular water changes, be patient, avoid chemicals if you can, don't chase zero nitrate and phosphate, remove the Hair Algae manually when it grows long (I've found it comes off the rock nearly 95% if you let it grow out to a couple inches long, rather than trying to rip it off daily), get a couple of Urchins (they go right to the rock after you manually remove the GHA and eat all leftovers), get some fish that you can enjoy until your ready for expensive corals, add some copepods, be patient and just try to enjoy the break-in period.