Advise on how to tackle low nutrient system

[Aaron Soliz]

Hello all,

For some reason my system has always been low nutrient. No matter how much I feed, no matter what I do... the only way I am able to get nutrients in there is dosing nitrate and broadcasting reefroids. I use to not do water changed on my 20 gallon system but since I have started dosing nitrates... I change out two gallons a week to get my calcium and alkalinity back to normal which is Calcium being at 470 and Alk at 10.

When I perform water changes, I do add 1 mil of nitrate which usually is around 10.4 ppm (check with my hanna nitrate checker) and I started to add a pinch of reef roids. I purchased Nyos Phosphate which will come in tomorrow so I can actually dose accordingly rather than broadcasting roids top my phosphate.

I am doing my best not to do too much where it could crash my system but I had to do something because my phosphates we are .01 while nitrate sat at 1.9 ppm. In the past 4 days I have raised my phosphate to .09 while my nitrate is at 2.9 now.

My question is once the phosphate comes in... am I able to dose both the same day and then check it within 24 hours and then adjust my dosing from there and if so... should I add more nitrate than phosphate? I noticed with reefroids... yes it def added phosphate but I noticed a small increase in nitrate even when I dosed an extra 3ppm of nitrate which is 3 mils for my tank.... it only upped it to 2.9ppm from 1.9ppm

I have a lot of soft corals and one torch coral. I can tell when nutrients are higher.. things tend to open up a lot more.

I do not run anything fancy in my chambers in the back. Just filter floss up top, Red Sea Carbon and a bag of Matrix. Would adding more Matrix help to have more good bacteria in the system.

Thank you for the help! It is much needed!

 

[Dread Pirate Dave]

What fish do you have? More fish would bring more nutrients but your tank size may not allow for it.

 

[Aaron Soliz]

What fish do you have? More fish would bring more nutrients but your tank size may not allow for it.

I thought so as well. Yes, I did add one more which would make it four. Two adult sized clownfish, one sixline wrasse and my last fish I added was about 3 months ago is a Chalk Basslett. I have tried feeding heavy and I don't understand how I can't get nutrients up. Baffling lol

 

[Dread Pirate Dave]

Any tank pictures? If the nutrients aren't being used by excessive algae then perhaps it's just your corals using it up. I had zero nitrates for months in my biocube. I started dosing ammonium bicarbonate and am finally above 1 on my hanna checker. Luckily phosphates stay around .03 with feeding. I also dose AB+ reef energy which helps too.

 

[Aaron Soliz]

Any tank pictures? If the nutrients aren't being used by excessive algae then perhaps it's just your corals using it up. I had zero nitrates for months in my biocube. I started dosing ammonium bicarbonate and am finally above 1 on my hanna checker. Luckily phosphates stay around .03 with feeding. I also dose AB+ reef energy which helps too.

It was doing better at one point I must say. Things were more opened up but I noticed around 5PM... some of my corals (Mainly OG bounce shrooms) tend to close even with the light being still at its peak which isn't high because I had the same light and schedule when things were running a bit smoother than now. They shrink and then in an hour... back to normal. It is the strangest thing,

I can try AB+ I have heard amminos help with nitrate.

 

[Aaron Soliz]

I checked nutrients today. After adding 2 mil of nitrate to the system it jumped it from 2.9 to 5.5ppm but phosphate went down from .09 to .04

I knew it would go down i just hoped it wouldn’t have been a large amount like that.