Okay. Very much a newbie Q. I've been at this for about seven months with a 120G reefer. My levels all seem pretty reasonable (salinity 1.025, Alk 8.2, Phosphate 0.00, Ca 430, Mg 1290, nitrates 10-15 ppm). My tank has 9 fish (2 clowns, blue tang, dwarf flame angel, rabbitfish, goby, blue chromis, and a blennie -- all less then 3" in size) along with a few corals and a blue linckia sea star, tuxedo urchin, and BTA. Couple of questions / thoughts.
First, besides water changes and feeding less, what else should I be doing to reduce nitrates? I'd like to add more fish but not sure if I can handle the additional bio-load.
Second, a couple of folks said that I might want to consider dosing for Alk (I manually adjust with soda ash) and magnesium. So my question is whether dosing is really something that I'll need to do over the long term (and buy a "nice" doser) or is this something where a simple BRS doser / timer combo will hold me for a while? I'd rather not buy something inexpensive today only to have to replace within a year.
Thanks in advance for all of your thoughts!
First, besides water changes and feeding less, what else should I be doing to reduce nitrates? I'd like to add more fish but not sure if I can handle the additional bio-load.
Second, a couple of folks said that I might want to consider dosing for Alk (I manually adjust with soda ash) and magnesium. So my question is whether dosing is really something that I'll need to do over the long term (and buy a "nice" doser) or is this something where a simple BRS doser / timer combo will hold me for a while? I'd rather not buy something inexpensive today only to have to replace within a year.
Thanks in advance for all of your thoughts!