Algae and false readings on test kits

[Steamreefer]

Kind of a difficult subject since I don't fully understand it buuut.

Tank is about 14 months old
100 gal
Mixed reef
Alk9.0
Mag1400
Cal450
Sal .025

Currently trying to dial in a kalkwasser dose. 1st time so going slow.

Anyway been battling algae like everyone else I believe it's turf/hair algae. Urchin is doing a good job on the rocks but my problem is the sand. I've been vacuuming once a week and a 30% wc once biweekly. Have 1 conch and like 7 nassarius. I know way under what I probably need.

So the sand develops these kind of small balls of what I'm guessing is the turf/hair algae as well as growing on the substrate making it appear brown under blue light, but is green under natural day light.

I've been patient for months monitoring my phophate and nitrate levels and adjusting them using brightwell products keeping phos under .01 and nitrate under 10 but usually under 5ppm.

Come to find out these are more than likely false readings if I'm understanding this correctly. My levels could in theory be much higher due to them being bound up in the algae I'm growing?

Now i know it's bad to bottom out phos and nitrate so ive been trying to avoid that, but have i just been fueling this algae adding the brightwell?

(Note my phophate is nearly bottoming out on its own daily, if I don't add neophos I'm confident it would read zero parts per BILLION on my ulr phosporus test)

Also worth adding a year in my corals have grown very very little, if I take a page from my freshwater planted tank days, plant growth suffered alot when algae was growing fast. So im hoping that is the case here.

Anyway, back to the false readings. If they are false or even potentially false, what do we do in this situation? Do we keep the test kits just off zero readings? Do we call the bluff and assume there's enough? What do people do?

I have a bottle of reef flux on the way to me, seems to have alot of positive reviews.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

To clarify, algae do not ever cause false readings. They are just consumers like all photosynthetic organisms.

 

[TokenReefer]

My levels could in theory be much higher due to them being bound up in the algae I'm growing?

I never quite understood this myself as I've seen it repeated. If you have algae, you will "feed" them if you dose po4. I don't know that there's a way around this with algae present. If you remove algae you will (in theory) free up po4 it would have consumed is how I understand it and therefore "release" it from being bound.. ? Maybe someone else can explain it better.

 

[lmfbs]

The way I understand is it with lots of algae that consumes nitrate and phos quickly, your export (other than the algae) might be less than it otherwise would need to be with the amount of input. So if you stopped growing algae tomorrow, it might be that your nitrate and phosphate increases more than you expect and you need to increase your export if you want to keep your levels low.