High Phosphate In New Tank

Flyangler33

Active Member
View Badges
Joined
Mar 11, 2024
Messages
107
Reaction score
50
Location
Tulsa
Rating - 0%
0   0   0
Hey All,

New reefer with my first tank journey and it has been a doozey. I have a 50gallon AIO IM fusion 2 tank. I am about 4 months in however I had almost a complete restart about midway through. Tornado tore through my town and knocked the power out for a day, while I was on vacation for a week. All my fish somehow survived, but all of my corals and inverts died. I came home to a tank riddled with an unbelievable amount of algae. I took some of the rock out piece by piece and cleaned it in a separate bin with salt water and manual toothbrush scrubbing. Got everything back into the tank and back in good order.

Long story short my parameters have been pretty stable for the last 7 weeks sitting around this:
7/15/2024
Nitrate5.8
Phosphate0.71
Alkalinity8.3
Calcium472
Salinity1.025
Temperature78
PH8
Magnesium1480

Everything seems happy and healthy, all the corals are fluffy and open fish are fat and happy. Is it worth messing with anything to bring my phosphates down? I am doing a weekly 10% water change. The only thing I have been adding to the tank is microbacter 7 was to help with the tornado incident as I had to pull some rock out and clean it because the algae was out of control and wanted to make sure I did not rid too much beneficial bacteria. I was looking at phosphate E but was worried more about bottoming everything out and having a whole different problem. Currently using Tropic Marin Pro Reef salt. Corals consist of Zoas, acans, favia, birdsnest, and frog spawn your typical beginner stuff. Curious if I should just ride it out since everything is happy and just keep the stability train rolling for a while before starting to tinker with phosphate adjustments. I do run a HOB skimmer its been on the tank for about 2 weeks, my old AIO skimmer was garbage compared to this one.

Any input is much appreciated! Happy Reefing!
 

Pod_01

Valuable Member
View Badges
Joined
Jan 10, 2022
Messages
1,144
Reaction score
1,085
Location
Waterloo
Rating - 0%
0   0   0
Just an opinion, based on this:
Everything seems happy and healthy, all the corals are fluffy and open fish are fat and happy.
I would just observe and see if PO4 starts to come down on its own. You can experiment with different types of fish food and see if there is reduction. Some frozen foods tend to increase PO4, some pellets not as much etc… Also I like to test PO4 before feeding or late at night once things settled in.

Little bit of carbon dosing can also promote bacteria.
Some speculate that products like microbacter 7 don’t really add any new bacteria but the food in the bottle feeds what is in the tank.

Good luck,
 
Back
Top