Goby raising phosphates?

[jasonbelcher1762]

I just put a Diamond Goby in my 30 gallon reef about 10 days ago and my water has been a murky mess ever since. Will this cause problems if this continues? Such as continuously raising phosphates higher and higher? Right now I'm testing at 0.5. I only run one HOB filter, but I'm thinking about buying a second one just for the mechanical filtration to help speed up getting the suspended detritus out of the water. This situation has made it kind of obvious that I don't seem to have enough filtration in the tank. Any recommendations are greatly appreciated.

 

[jasonbelcher1762]

I guess also I should have mentioned that I have a sandbed 1-2" thick.

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

You can add a bag of rowa phos or chemiclean or something similar in your hob to absorb the phosphates. I’m not sure how adding a fish can increase phosphates though

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

Also what test kit are you using?

 

[jasonbelcher1762]

Using API kit. I figured with the goby constantly kicking up the sandbed with settled detritus in it to the point that the water is very cloudy, that that might be elevating the phosphates in the water. Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong though.

 

[Hyzu]

Same thing happened when i added 2 diamond gobies. They started kicking everything up that wasn't vaccumed out and spiked phosphates. Added rowaphos at half the dose to slowly bring it back down over 3 weeks.

 

[ReeVo]

I've had phosphates spike just from siphoning the sand bed a little aggressively when I let too much time elapse from the last sand siphoning. So, I can imagine a Goby stirring up the sand bed resulted in the same outcome.

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

Using API kit. I figured with the goby constantly kicking up the sandbed with settled detritus in it to the point that the water is very cloudy, that that might be elevating the phosphates in the water. Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong though.

So with an API kit your phosphates is not .5. API doesn't give a value, it gives a range, the first range is zero to .25, then .25 to .5. So it means your phosphate is somewhere between .25 and .5. This doesn't work for our hobby so the best thing to do it throw the phosphate test in garbage. The very best phosphate tester is hanna. API is good to guide you, but don't dose or make any changes to your water chemistry based on API, you need to get better test kits. I like salifert and hanna.