Golden Water Parameters?

[reefinginBD]

Hey guys, I have a 5x2x2 feet 150 gallon tank set up, I’m currently adding corals into the tank and plan to make it a mixed reef with mostly soft and meaty corals. What would be the ideal water parameters to shoot for? I’m using Fritz rpm salt.

Temperature: 26C
Salinity: 1.026
pH: 8.1 (want to increase it to 8.2-8.3 and need some tips on how to increase it)
Nitrate: 25 (want to get it down to 10)
Phosphate: 0.05 (want to get it down to 0.03)
Calcium: 400 (want to increase it to 450)
Magnesium: 1200 (want to increase it 1350)
Alkalinity: 8 (want to increase to 8.5)


Corals I have:
Blastomusa
Colt
Hairy Mushroom
Montipora
Hammer
Toadstool
Frogspawn

Corals I want/getting soon:
Kenya
Gorgonion
Other meaty corals (need suggestions on which ones I can get, preferably not named ones since those are really expensive)
Some more montipora and other easy to keep branching sps
GSP
Zoas (not really sure about this one)

Please recommend corals that you like and think will go well with this scape. As well as rate this scape out of 10!

I’ll attach a picture of it with the corals I currently have in the morning!

 

[Jekyl]

How old is this tank? Maturity matters a lot too.

 

[reefinginBD]

The tank is 7 months old (if I start counting from the day after adding the first fish). This picture that I attached is right after I filled it with water and it cleared up. It’s currently night time here so I’ll post a picture in the morning of what the tank looks like right now.

 

[reefinginBD]

I’m currently facing some problems with diatoms so I’m trying to fix that up. My skimmer plug broke and it was off for about 2 weeks while I was out of the country and during this time the nitrate rose to over 50 and phosphates over 1 but now those have come down to control.

 

[MDReefguy]

I think your numbers look pretty good. Are you dosing anything, and do you have a fuge in your sump?

 

[reefinginBD]

I am dosing some things but I’ll probably stop and just move onto doing weekly or bi weekly water changes, I’ll probably start dosing again after I add all the corals and they start to grow in a bit.

I had a fuge with chaeto and grape algae all of which died for some reason, so now I turned it into a diy hair algae fuge, there are a few pieces of egg cage in there where the hair algae grows along with the walls.

 

[MDReefguy]

Kalkwasser or 2 part can bump alk and calcium. Kalk can bump up PH. A reverse light cycle on your refugium can also bump ph at night. I'd start there, keep up with smaller water changes, and let it roll for a while.

 

[reefinginBD]

Yeap that’s what I did with the fuge, the ph is more stable now but it still stays around 8.1 ish all day.
Kalkwasser isn’t always available here so we usually use lab grade materials to raise calcium, magnesium and alkalinity, which is what I will probably start using again. I’m hoping that the water changes will be enough for now since I don’t have much corals, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have to start dosing once the corals grow out a bit and I add more as well.
Thanks!