Hey guys, new to the forum, and for the sake of simplicity id consider myself a novice in the hobby as well, despite having had a tank prior to this one. My current 60 gal tank is just a few months under a year old. I haven't been in a huge rush to stock the tank so I currently have 2 clowns and a hippo tang, and no coral. Was just about to start getting my stocking underway but my nitrates and phosphates are pretty high. Nitrates were in the 50ppm range and phosphates in the 0.4 range when i started testing a month or 3 ago. At the recommendation of an LFS I started dosing ESV B-Ionic transition elements plus as per the directions on the bottle. I used it for a little over a month without any change in my parameters so I have since stopped (unsure if the right thing to do).
What I find bizarre is that my tank (to me) looks and seems pretty healthy. The tank is spotless aside from the sand browning a bit between water changes, all my cleanup crew guys SEEM great, my fish seem active and healthy. I do a 10% water change each week fairly consistently though I have missed a week a few times. I change my filter sock every 3 days, my skimmer seems to be producing well. I have since started to feed every other day to see if that helped, which i don't like the idea as i feel like im starving the fish (maybe not).
i test with Hannah products, and to illustrate my current timeline, on Nov 13th my nitrates tested at 54.3 and phosphate at 0.26. I missed last weeks water change. After doing the water change this past Sunday my reading as of today are 57.4 nitrate and 0.48 phosphate. The only thing i did different was i disturbed the sand bed quite a bit with this weeks water change so maybe i released some stuff, but im not sure that would explain the consistently high numbers.
After reading through similar issues I've seen lots of people saying to shoot for equilibrium and not chase numbers which makes sense. Am i in that equilibrium since everything seems healthy? Or should i continue attempting to reduce these numbers before stocking more fish and coral? Any advice would be greatly appreciated as its stressing me out lol. Thanks in advance.
Todays Readings:
Temp: 78.7
PH: 7.89
Alk: 6.73
CA: 640
MG: 1185
Nitrate: 57.4
Phos: 0.48
salinity: 1.024
What I find bizarre is that my tank (to me) looks and seems pretty healthy. The tank is spotless aside from the sand browning a bit between water changes, all my cleanup crew guys SEEM great, my fish seem active and healthy. I do a 10% water change each week fairly consistently though I have missed a week a few times. I change my filter sock every 3 days, my skimmer seems to be producing well. I have since started to feed every other day to see if that helped, which i don't like the idea as i feel like im starving the fish (maybe not).
i test with Hannah products, and to illustrate my current timeline, on Nov 13th my nitrates tested at 54.3 and phosphate at 0.26. I missed last weeks water change. After doing the water change this past Sunday my reading as of today are 57.4 nitrate and 0.48 phosphate. The only thing i did different was i disturbed the sand bed quite a bit with this weeks water change so maybe i released some stuff, but im not sure that would explain the consistently high numbers.
After reading through similar issues I've seen lots of people saying to shoot for equilibrium and not chase numbers which makes sense. Am i in that equilibrium since everything seems healthy? Or should i continue attempting to reduce these numbers before stocking more fish and coral? Any advice would be greatly appreciated as its stressing me out lol. Thanks in advance.
Todays Readings:
Temp: 78.7
PH: 7.89
Alk: 6.73
CA: 640
MG: 1185
Nitrate: 57.4
Phos: 0.48
salinity: 1.024