I am by no means an expert in coral since I've only started keeping them this year, but I will share an observation I have regarding water changes and water quality...
When I first started my coral QT tank, I started out with 0 Ammonia, 0 Nitrite, 5 Nitrate and 0 Phosphate and since there were no fish or invertebrates it pretty much stayed that way for a while. My coral would go in the tank looking good and within a week or two they would start to close up and did not look happy. I kept seeing videos of people talking about a certain coral liking, "dirty water" or other coral that could deal with, "dirty water" and didn't really understand the concept since I thought the whole idea was to keep the water parameters pristine.
I finally found a post on another forum that talked about it and it did not mean that the water was, "dirty" but that it had higher amounts of dissolved nutrients. I even heard people talking about getting their Nitrates up to around 20 PPM before starting to do water changes and keeping them around that number permanently. I had never really had the problem of having to increase my Nitrates, but figured I could skip a few water changes and feed a bit more and even added some inverts to the QT since they didn't need medication and the QT period was the same amount of time for both.
Flash forward a few weeks and I started seeing measurable amount of Nitrates and my coral was looking more healthy and would open up and stay open all day. Now I do not do weekly water changes any more, but do weekly testing and the test results determine if I do a water change instead of just doing it out of routine and my coral are all looking great!
I will add that I have only been keeping LPS and a few Softies and have no idea if the same will be true when I start adding SPS, but I will figure that out when I get there... ;Happy
When I first started my coral QT tank, I started out with 0 Ammonia, 0 Nitrite, 5 Nitrate and 0 Phosphate and since there were no fish or invertebrates it pretty much stayed that way for a while. My coral would go in the tank looking good and within a week or two they would start to close up and did not look happy. I kept seeing videos of people talking about a certain coral liking, "dirty water" or other coral that could deal with, "dirty water" and didn't really understand the concept since I thought the whole idea was to keep the water parameters pristine.
I finally found a post on another forum that talked about it and it did not mean that the water was, "dirty" but that it had higher amounts of dissolved nutrients. I even heard people talking about getting their Nitrates up to around 20 PPM before starting to do water changes and keeping them around that number permanently. I had never really had the problem of having to increase my Nitrates, but figured I could skip a few water changes and feed a bit more and even added some inverts to the QT since they didn't need medication and the QT period was the same amount of time for both.
Flash forward a few weeks and I started seeing measurable amount of Nitrates and my coral was looking more healthy and would open up and stay open all day. Now I do not do weekly water changes any more, but do weekly testing and the test results determine if I do a water change instead of just doing it out of routine and my coral are all looking great!
I will add that I have only been keeping LPS and a few Softies and have no idea if the same will be true when I start adding SPS, but I will figure that out when I get there... ;Happy
