I never heard of adding nitrates to the tank. My nitrates are undetectable and at this this point surprisingly are at .06 without any phosphate removing media.
Old school this would be considered as a sin, in which is where I am from, I started the hobby in 1999 (took a 2007-2013 break). But...these days some people are open to having a nitrate level of 5ppm and some people's systems requires them dosing nitrates to keep it up. It took me a lot of soul searching for me to get over what I was taught basically all of my reefkeeping life and start dosing nitrates to play with the phosphates level though BioPellets. I have learned if one of the two is high it is because the other is low. If both are high that just means you are overstock and/or feeding too much and your export system can't keep up.
As for 3 days lights out, that's just putting a band-aid over skin cut when the same deep cut is causing internal bleeding. Cyano will be right back at it when lights are back on. You need to find the source and fix it or have a better export system in place.
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