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- May 6, 2020
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I think your nutrient export is being regulated by the iron (or possibly something else) that your water changes add. If you wanted to, I believe you could dose iron in a safe way and you could control a maximum possible amount allowed in your aquarium over the long term. The way you could do it is by your water changes. FirstI'll say there isn't a spec of algae in the tank, water looks crystal clear and my rocks are clean as can be. My rock work is detailed so even with close to 100x flow in the display I know I have pockets of detritus...when I rearranged rocks months ago I could see pockets of it collecting. Sand looks perfectly white and my LPS while doing ok don't have great color.
Visually my tank shows all the signs of low nutrients but lots of test kits all show the same results; if things were stuck at 25 i'd be A ok with it as I do like the current look of my tank but my concern is that it's rising and I really don't know why nor can I seem to control it. A moving parameter that I can't control is a bad thing.
One thing I noticed these last several days is that my skim smells really bad (not like sulfur but almost like frozen food that sat out too long) and the foam is so thick it blows the lid off the cup making it extremely hard to collect skim (even weighting it down blows off whatever is on top). I even tried a 10lb weight to weigh it down and it started to push it off.
My algae turf screen has a very thick green mat collected weekly. It's so interesting that my nitrates don't seem to drop with all the "export" I feel I am doing.
thing you do is determine the maximum iron levels you would allow for your aquarium, then you add enough to the new water for the water change to increase to that amount. Of course you could determine the minimum amount of iron in your aquarium after a water change also. If you decided you wanted to do this, the first thing you should probably do is determine how much iron you want to add to your aquarium in the short term.(dose iron with water changes later) Then you dose a small amount of iron each day(over two or three weeks or whatever time period you want) until it adds up to the amount of iron to increase iron levels where you want them. Every day while your increasing iron watch out for cyano, bacteria blooms, coral darkness relative to nutrient and light levels, watch algae growth, test alkalinity, etc.
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