Ideal Alk level relative to nitrates (nutrients)

Privateye

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Can I potentially throw a wrench into this discussion?

What about when people feed their corals directly? Then they would acquire N and P with less effect/reliance on the aquarium chemistry. I'm wondering if this relationship we're talking about can only be measured in a tank where the corals do not directly consume food.
 
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Lovefish77

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Can I potentially throw a wrench into this discussion?

What about when people feed their corals directly? Then they would acquire N and P with less effect/reliance on the aquarium chemistry. I'm wondering if this relationship we're talking about can only be measured in a tank where the corals do not directly consume food.
You have a point but I have a bunch of insatiable tangs so even direct feeding for lps is like impossible. Only thing I can feed directly is black widow nems as they will not dare grab food from its mouth. I mean my sailfish tang ate super glue mistaking it for food a few months back lol. And tangs are really fat so target feeding sps will not fly, whenever they see my stand in front of the tank they would come by. It is almost like having a dog
 

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You have a point but I have a bunch of insatiable tangs so even direct feeding for lps is like impossible. Only thing I can feed directly is black widow nems as they will not dare grab food from its mouth. I mean my sailfish tang ate super glue mistaking it for food a few months back lol. And tangs are really fat so target feeding sps will not fly, whenever they see my stand in front of the tank they would come by. It is almost like having a dog

Yeah don't get me wrong, I don't target feed anything really and the tank is packed with coral. I'm scraping it off the front glass these days.

I have never dosed NO3 or PO4 intentionally myself, but I understand the concept. I feed 5 cubes of food per week in a 90 gallon. I use an API kit to measure these parameters, and they show up as slightly off of 0ish. I bought a Hanna checker for the PO4 a few weeks ago but I haven't used it yet.

Once dosing calcium/alk (spaced out) 5 times per day wasn't enough to keep up with the growth, I bought two dosing pumps. I just bought a 3rd (about 1.5 years later) for my magnesium as it's become a 1-2x daily thing too.

Who knows? Maybe nutrients may be my next limiting factor. It's chemistry whack-a-mole!
 
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Lovefish77

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Just an update, I did not feed as much in the past few days. I just tested nitrates and it came at zero again!! So my acro is struggling as you can see in the pic.
I just lowered algae scrubber to 3 hours from 7 in an attempt to raise nitrates a bit.
Just a note PE on that acro has been very bad in the past few days.
Let me know your thoughts. You think it is done for that acro?

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Lovefish77

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So just wanted to give an update, the acro colony not looking better..actually worse.

I started dosing sodium nitrate, raised nitrates to like 1 ppm over the course of several days. I also re- engaged my algae scrubber like 8 hours a day as phosphates creeped up to 0.08 (from 0.06) in like 10 days.
 

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Charlie’s Frags

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So just wanted to give an update, the acro colony not looking better..actually worse.

I started dosing sodium nitrate, raised nitrates to like 1 ppm over the course of several days. I also re- engaged my algae scrubber like 8 hours a day as phosphates creeped up to 0.08 (from 0.06) in like 10 days.
You’re going to lose all your sps if you don’t stop over stripping your water or you start feeding a ALOT more. The only concern you should have about 0.08 po4 is that it’s still too low. Get it up 0.12-0.15
 
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You’re going to lose all your sps if you don’t stop over stripping your water or you start feeding a ALOT more. The only concern you should have about 0.08 po4 is that it’s still too low. Get it up 0.12-0.15
So that value is ok? I feed a ton like 5 cubes a day. I started dosing sodium nitrates to raise nitrates
I basically keep pouring food in the tank
 

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So that value is ok? I feed a ton like 5 cubes a day. I started dosing sodium nitrates to raise nitrates
I basically keep pouring food in the tank
Yes. I know you had some frags zero out when your no3 elevated but honestly they already had half of their polyps in the grave.
I keep my alk between 6.5 and 8.5
No3 10-25
Po4 0.10-0.25
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I feed 4 cubes a day in a 50g tank. You’re removing all the nutrition before your corals have a chance to absorb it. I would turn off the algae scrubber until they come up a lot.
 
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I see I bought this colony from a guy who had nitrates of 2ppm. So scratching my head here.
Lps seems to be doing great I also add acropower a lot daily.

Thank you but it seems you are at the other end of the spectrum with high nutrients and great acros.
 

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I see I bought this colony from a guy who had nitrates of 2ppm. So scratching my head here.
Lps seems to be doing great I also add acropower a lot daily.

Thank you but it seems you are at the other end of the spectrum with high nutrients and great acros.
2 ppm no3 doesn’t tell the whole story.

I joined r2r back in 2017 and have yet to see where elevated no3/po4 caused mass acro death, but every other day there’s a death thread with “perfect/ideal” levels but they are skimming heavy, carbon dosing, gfo, fuge/scrubber etc. Then it gets blamed on a 0.5 dKh swing that happened a month ago. When in reality they are just starving their corals bc they were told or read that no3/po4 needs to be x/y or your acros will die. I have another tank with 50+no3 and +0.50po4 and still no death. The corals are a little darker in that tank but not brown like the paranoia would lead you to believe.

I’m not the only one who has had success with higher levels. SBB corals, wwc, top shelf aquatics, cherry corals and Jason Fox all keep there no3/po4 much higher than you do.
 

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I see I bought this colony from a guy who had nitrates of 2ppm. So scratching my head here.
Lps seems to be doing great I also add acropower a lot daily.

Thank you but it seems you are at the other end of the spectrum with high nutrients and great acros.

How are your other SPS doing?
 

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I know not acro but it's an sps montipora digitata. Alk at 8 calcium 440
Phosphates 0.25
Nitrates 100 ish everything is growing like crazy.
Metor shower recovering from a friend's tank
Horn coral
Digitata are all growing fantastic.
Running a canister
Hob skimmer
When we start chasing numbers we make things worse.
I would cut your algea scrubber back to an hour stop any gfo or carbon dosing and feed more. Let the food thaw in tank water and pour into the tank. The water doesn't have enough nutrients
 

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Also, what's your alkalinity at? I hope it isn't above 7.
 
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Lovefish77

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Also, what's your alkalinity at? I hope it isn't above 7.
Was 7.7 but I cut down dosing. Bit. T
I thought it should
Also, what's your alkalinity at? I hope it isn't above 7.
It was 7.7 but i lowered my dosing a bit. I thought it is bad when you are above 8 and with zero nutrients, right? or the threshold is 7?
 
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How are your other SPS doing?
Surprisingly other SPS are doing fine. But i don't have a lot; a big birds nest colony that is growing and doing fine, a montipora red digitata that is also doing fine, and a purple stylophora that is growing and coloring fine. Now for acros; i lost a frag, the big colony is struggling (as you see from the pic) and i have another acro frag that has the same symptoms (burnt tips). So all the problems are in the acros.
Now my fear is i have like 10-15 black widow anemones in that tank and i am a bit afraid that something might happen to them if i take N and P to the levels you guys are talking about.
I feed a ton, i have 4 big tangs in that tank, and they eat like pigs. So not sure what i am missing. Coraline seems to be growing fine on the rocks i recently added like 3 or 4 months back. But nutrient export magic is in the sump. About 4-5 months back i changed my entire aqua scape in the display with absolutely no impact to nitrates or phosphates.. this is just to give you an idea how bad efficient my nutrient export is. I feed the anemones like very fatty fish (like 2 ounce of food) twice a week!!!
Thoughts?
 
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2 ppm no3 doesn’t tell the whole story.

I joined r2r back in 2017 and have yet to see where elevated no3/po4 caused mass acro death, but every other day there’s a death thread with “perfect/ideal” levels but they are skimming heavy, carbon dosing, gfo, fuge/scrubber etc. Then it gets blamed on a 0.5 dKh swing that happened a month ago. When in reality they are just starving their corals bc they were told or read that no3/po4 needs to be x/y or your acros will die. I have another tank with 50+no3 and +0.50po4 and still no death. The corals are a little darker in that tank but not brown like the paranoia would lead you to believe.

I’m not the only one who has had success with higher levels. SBB corals, wwc, top shelf aquatics, cherry corals and Jason Fox all keep there no3/po4 much higher than you do.
I see i get that this school of high nutrients works. I never use any media not even carbon because once i used to add it PE would go down and corals would get stressed. I tried raising nitrates a few month back but this crashed ALL my SPS (non acros). I basically started dosing tree stump remover using Randy's formula, but that nuked everything. Could be a contamination with the product or anything else, and maybe i raised it quickly to like 3 ppm in 2 days or so then hell broke loose. This time i am doing it differently with food grade sodium nitrate and a bit slower (raised nitrates by 1 ppm in like 4 days).
 

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Surprisingly other SPS are doing fine. But i don't have a lot; a big birds nest colony that is growing and doing fine, a montipora red digitata that is also doing fine, and a purple stylophora that is growing and coloring fine. Now for acros; i lost a frag, the big colony is struggling (as you see from the pic) and i have another acro frag that has the same symptoms (burnt tips). So all the problems are in the acros.
Now my fear is i have like 10-15 black widow anemones in that tank and i am a bit afraid that something might happen to them if i take N and P to the levels you guys are talking about.
I feed a ton, i have 4 big tangs in that tank, and they eat like pigs. So not sure what i am missing. Coraline seems to be growing fine on the rocks i recently added like 3 or 4 months back. But nutrient export magic is in the sump. About 4-5 months back i changed my entire aqua scape in the display with absolutely no impact to nitrates or phosphates.. this is just to give you an idea how bad efficient my nutrient export is. I feed the anemones like very fatty fish (like 2 ounce of food) twice a week!!!
Thoughts?
Bud, if your acros are struggling, it behooves you to pay attention to the advice of some of the folks who are offering it on this forum.

Do yourself a favor, provide a rundown of all of your parameters in a single post (eg. Alk, cal, mg, nitrate, phosphate, etc.) That way, people can readily chime in rather than synthesize and distill basic info over the course of multiple pages.
 
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Lovefish77

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Bud, if your acros are struggling, it behooves you to pay attention to the advice of some of the folks who are offering it on this forum.

Do yourself a favor, provide a rundown of all of your parameters in a single post (eg. Alk, cal, mg, nitrate, phosphate, etc.) That way, people can readily chime in rather than synthesize and distill basic info over the course of multiple pages.
Maybe you have not read a lot of the thread, but the parameters have been provided before. Here they are again:
Nitrates - Zero to 1ppm (1ppm very recent)
Photosphate 0.06 - 0.08 (0.08 being very recent)
Alk 7.5 to 7.7
Calcium 400
Mag 1280-1300
Lots of feeding
Light intensity high - Acros are at 300-380 par; anemones get a bit more like 400-420.
Anything else i missed?
thanks
 

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Maybe you need to re-read my posts. Not a big deal if you can’t.

If you are soliciting free and altruistically-provided info/advice, it may make sense (maybe) to make it easy for folks to find (maybe).

Best of luck, though. If you were rubbed the wrong way by @Chaswood79 ugly tenius, take it up with him (maybe).

Your Alk is a bit high. Your mag is a bit low. You seem to prefer low nutrients. So drip lanthanum, carbon dose and run a bit of GFO. Best of luck.
 

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I never knew there was a ratio of nitrate to alk. I thought alk was only related to ca and mg because all 3 were needed for coral growth. Interested to learn about this.
 

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