TheReelColton
New Member
Hello friends,
My 125 has had coral in it for almost a year at this point (coral is light-moderately stocked, 40ish pieces). I have had great success learning on here from other reefers and got my tank dialed in nicely.
The one area I haven't been able to get consistent is nutrients. Specifically nitrates. Phosphate is pretty solid at .04ppm.
When I was beginning my reefing journey, my nutrients were rather high. Around 60.0+ppm nitrate and honestly not sure about phosphate. But after carbon dosing vinegar, late last year I successfully managed to get my nitrate down and wipe out a few patches of red cyano I had. However it bottomed out and I have struggled getting it back up ever since. So in 5 months with my skimmer offline and feeding a sheet of nori plus frozen cube every day, nitrate was still zero. I resorted to dosing sodium nitrate, brought my level up to 6.0ppm and waited. 12 days later I check again, and today its back to 0.0.
My questions are: is this going to stress my coral out going from 0 to 6ppm back and forth over a 12 day (or less) cycle, and is this normal? Everything is currently doing great except a sulking bernardpora which was recently looking wonderful.
I removed all but a fist size ball of chaeto from my fuge, shortened the photo period to only a few hours, added an additional fish plus more snails and increased feeding. If this isn't enough to offset the uptake, I'm puzzled what could be consuming nitrate at such a rate.
There isn't much algae around but I have considered getting an urchin to aid the snails efforts
I'm just noticing small patches of red cyano begin to spread on my rockwork, so I'm eager to sort this out before it becomes more of a problem.
Fish stocking is currently two 4 inch tangs, two clowns, yellow watchman, yellow Halichoeres, and a single chromis.
Thank you all in advance for your expertise
My 125 has had coral in it for almost a year at this point (coral is light-moderately stocked, 40ish pieces). I have had great success learning on here from other reefers and got my tank dialed in nicely.
The one area I haven't been able to get consistent is nutrients. Specifically nitrates. Phosphate is pretty solid at .04ppm.
When I was beginning my reefing journey, my nutrients were rather high. Around 60.0+ppm nitrate and honestly not sure about phosphate. But after carbon dosing vinegar, late last year I successfully managed to get my nitrate down and wipe out a few patches of red cyano I had. However it bottomed out and I have struggled getting it back up ever since. So in 5 months with my skimmer offline and feeding a sheet of nori plus frozen cube every day, nitrate was still zero. I resorted to dosing sodium nitrate, brought my level up to 6.0ppm and waited. 12 days later I check again, and today its back to 0.0.
My questions are: is this going to stress my coral out going from 0 to 6ppm back and forth over a 12 day (or less) cycle, and is this normal? Everything is currently doing great except a sulking bernardpora which was recently looking wonderful.
I removed all but a fist size ball of chaeto from my fuge, shortened the photo period to only a few hours, added an additional fish plus more snails and increased feeding. If this isn't enough to offset the uptake, I'm puzzled what could be consuming nitrate at such a rate.
There isn't much algae around but I have considered getting an urchin to aid the snails efforts
I'm just noticing small patches of red cyano begin to spread on my rockwork, so I'm eager to sort this out before it becomes more of a problem.
Fish stocking is currently two 4 inch tangs, two clowns, yellow watchman, yellow Halichoeres, and a single chromis.
Thank you all in advance for your expertise
