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Just Getting Started. All Advice Encouraged! (1 Viewer)

I went through something like this recently with dinos and then cyano. I had undetectable nitrates and started dosing ESV for nitrate to keep it around 10. This helped provide a condition for other biodiversity to show itself and help outcompete the dinos. Also coral does get a large part of energy from the algae inside of it, zooxanthellae. The zero nitrates could be a large contributor to not getting good results from coral.

It will be a lot of manual removal and brushing rock for stubborn spots but don't get discouraged... after you get past that it will go from being a chore to actually enjoying the tank.

How is your flow? It looks like it's covering the majority of the tank so I'm guessing you don't have good water flow. Usually cyano will really thrive in lower flow areas.
 
I stopped my skimmer and removed the carbon from the tank, added pods from NWA, and just finished dosing microbacter 7 earlier this week. Kept my feeding schedule the same. I went out of town last weekend and had my wife lightly tend to the tank in my absence (clean the glass, feed the fish, dose microbacter).

To my surprise, the cyano is almost completely gone. A little on substrate, but nothing to get worked up about. I have a little more GHA than before, but it is easily removed manually and also provides something for my tuxedo urchin to munch on. A week into this process, my phosphates tested at 0.16 and dropped to 0.04 after the water change. They were 0.03 today before the weekly water change. Nitrates, however, have remained at 0.0 throughout the interventions. Obviously things are happening, given that the tank looks dramatically better, but I'm wondering if it is time to consider boosting the nitrates to a detectable level or just let things continue to develop.

What experience do people have dosing ammonia? Or would you recommend an alternative supplementation route?
 
I would add nitrates or add Fish if your tank allows it but first make sure your test kit is accurate… when I first setup my tank I was reading 0s on NYOS test kit until I switch to Hanna and got a reading of 28 ppm.
 
I would dose. At least until you get it off 0.

As we discussed, I use ammonium bicarbonate per the recipe from RHF. I think @spsick does the same. It seems easy to mix up and easy to use. I have no regrets.
 
Varig said:
I would dose. At least until you get it off 0.

As we discussed, I use ammonium bicarbonate per the recipe from RHF. I think @spsick does the same. It seems easy to mix up and easy to use. I have no regrets.
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Agreed, just to keep above zero.
Ammonium Bicarbonate is a little more advanced /cost effective method for long term needs. Neonitro is easy to add/test if it’s temporary.
 
hamtb1 said:
Thanks. I use Hanna for my testing, so I feel pretty confident in my numbers.
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Hanna and Salifert are reliable IMO

@Varig @spsick are you still dosing phosphates as well ? Trying to figure out the length of tail on this. 🤓
 
Length of tail?

For me yes, I have to dose phosphate on both of my tanks to keep them above zero. Now that I got the nitrates off zero, my display tank does NOT require daily nitrate dosing. But my coral/invert QT tank does require daily dosing of nitrate via the ammonium bicarbonate. That being said, in the past couple of weeks my DT nitrate has dropped from ~6 to 5 to 3.5ppm, so maybe there will be a "light" nitrate dosing required.
 
Yes length of tail as in how long has it been seen setup. For me I never had a nitrate issue my four tangs and fox face are a poop factory
 
Ah gotcha. DT was setup Nov. 2023. Nitrate was in an okay range (5-10ppm) and even high (~25ppm) summer of 2024, until the ATS took off around Oct. 2024. It bottomed out phosphate and took a huge hit on nitrate. Whoops. I reacted, but not strongly enough. So wallowed around zeros phosphate and low nitrate for too long. Finally I listened to the acro sage @spsick and took the ATS offline. Then I dosed nitrate and phosphate. Nitrate I only had to dose for ~1month, then it has been fine from the fish load. But phosphate I need to dose daily.


For the coral QT, that has been setup now for…3 years or so. It has no fish, just corals/inverts. So I’m sure that’s why it lacks nutrients. It thus gets nitrate and phosphate both, daily.
 
asifiqbal2 said:
Hanna and Salifert are reliable IMO

@Varig @spsick are you still dosing phosphates as well ? Trying to figure out the length of tail on this. 🤓
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When I migrated to the new tank I had to dose ammonia for a while to keep Nitrate above zero, then it skyrocketed to 25ppm and stayed there without dosing for like 2 months and has since settled at 3ppm. I am dosing neophos to keep above zero currently. It seems to be creeping even though I’ve decreased dose so I think I’m close to being done with it as well.
 
Makes sense guys Nitrates catch up but the phosphate takes time to saturate the rock. I did double stupid and decided to start with dry sand 🤦‍♂️
 
I dose 10ml a day of 5x concentration neo phos and keeps it around 0.1 if I don’t next day drops to 0.05 so I guess I could dose 5ml but my nitrates have stabilized at 20ppm constant
 
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