in your opinion therefore to have intense colors in the acropora at what levels do you have to keep no3 and po4? I also saw that some keep these substances at zero but have fantastic colors. How is it possible?
Mark's 150 gallon SPS heavy reef
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OP
OP
Depends on the tank. If you have a lot of fish you can still have 0 nitrates yet great colors if they are getting all they need. In my tank the fish load is not great so 0 usually indicates near starvation. I look to get some positive reading just to confirm there is some extra left over. I also believe nitrate is not their preferred way to get ammonia but will suffice if the fish load is lacking. Here's some light reading.
https://aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.4319/lo.2002.47.3.0782
Depends on the tank. If you have a lot of fish you can still have 0 nitrates yet great colors if they are getting all they need. In my tank the fish load is not great so 0 usually indicates near starvation. I look to get some positive reading just to confirm there is some extra left over. I also believe nitrate is not their preferred way to get ammonia but will suffice if the fish load is lacking. Here's some light reading.
thank you so much
OP
OP
Top downs.
Lokani has healed where I took a frag, good sign.
The smaller Katropora, which started in my 40 gallon when this tank was crashing last year.
The original frag.
Red Robin, color comes and goes.
Lokani has healed where I took a frag, good sign.
The smaller Katropora, which started in my 40 gallon when this tank was crashing last year.
The original frag.
Red Robin, color comes and goes.
OP
OP
I have my fingers crossed, but still not super confident!
I had to frag my lokani today, aefw!
Sorry man, hopefully you can take care of them.
On a frag, and they never spread in this tank, ever. Until they did. Jumped to the back without me noticing, when I saw them expanding on the rock I removed the rock. Too late.
revhtree
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Top downs.
Lokani has healed where I took a frag, good sign.
The smaller Katropora, which started in my 40 gallon when this tank was crashing last year.
The original frag.
Red Robin, color comes and goes.
Oh wow so beautiful!
OP
OP
Sorry for the lack of updates, let's get caught up.
I've been trying to get the tank to settle down after the disastrous carbon dosing experiment.
The Lokani went through another round of RTN and stopped again. It's in back under lower light now and in the process I made two frags. One died, one lived, so now I'm at 2 frags plus what remains of the original colony.
My KH reached 7.0 a few days ago and I was happy I finally managed 7 ... a few days later it started to bother me since this tank hasn't hit 7 for months so I tested again, 9.1 KH! BAH! Doser turned off, Kalk diluted the first day, then resumed at full strength once I confirmed Alk was dropping at a decent rate. Since then I've bee obsessed with day vs night Alk usage so I'm doing multiple tests daily to try and figure out current daily usage plus day vs night usage. My concern is that with the Alk usage rising I'm actually becoming more unstable by dosing 24/7 rather than just during the daylight hours. THis is a meaningless fact in younger tanks but as coral volume increases and daily dosing increases these swings can become a real issue.
For the sake of discussion, lets say my daily Alk usage is 2 KH. If I dose that over 24 hours then my morning Alk will be 8, end of light cycle will be 7, and then it will climb to 8 by the next morning if we assume corals do not use any Alk at night (which is what many are confirming). This assumes I'm dosing enough for 1 KH during the 12 hour day and another 1 KH overnight so the drop is only half of the total daily usage.
Maybe 1 KH is no big deal, but what if My Alk usage is something crazy, like 6 KH daily?
Suddenly I'm doing daily swings from 9KH in the morning to 6KH in the evening. That's pretty flipping huge! As you can see, continuing 24 hour dosing and continuing to raise the amount as the tank grows actually decreases stability due to the difference in day/night usage.
That's my theory. I don't have an expensive 24/7 Alk tester but I am doing numerous tests here for the next day to see if I see the pattern. Because my KH spiked to 9 my doser is off but Kalk is still being added via my timed topoff every 15 minutes. It's saturated Kalk so using the calculator and figuring my usage is about .8 gallons daily, this equates to 0.6KH of Kalk added daily.
So far my daily measurements with Salifert, backed up by Hanna, are:
9.3 at 4pm
8.8 at 6:30pm
8.6 at 8:30pm
8.5 at 6AM (Kalk back to full strength, my estimate is + .3 to .4 KH overnight)
8.1 at 4PM
7.9 at 6:30PM
7.7 at 8:30PM
8.0 at 6:30AM
I expected Alk to rise due to Kalk dosing and it did. I expected up to .3 and testing twice I got 8.0 twice so I think this is a decent reading. There should have been some usage after the 8:30 reading due to the blue LEDs being on full blast until 9:30. Most likely I am dosing more Kalk than I thought, which is likely since it's a guess based on how long topoff lasts. 5 gallons last a little over 5 days. Remember I do timed topoff with Kalk, it's not float based, so dosing is consistent.
So, if all goes as expected this evenings Alk should be 7.2 KH, tomorrow morning 7.5, tomorrow evening 6.7 if I don't turn on the doser.
Running the calculator and getting the amount to raise Alk from 6.7 to 7.5 I get aprox 80ml (I'm using 140 gallons as tank volume + sump - equipment and rocks).
Doser is set to 120ml over 24 hours so what I think I will do is put it on a timer so it goes on Saturday at 10am and off at 10pm. This should dose 60ml which is not enough to fully maintain Alk. A safe start. If this works then in the end I will have more stable Alk by only dosing during lights on.
Of course this assumes that the Alk spike was short and not too damaging. Right now everything looks good but Alk spikes can show damage days or weeks later so we'll see.
What's left of the Lokani
After latest rescape and slight trim. I wanted to get more light in front to safe some dying/shaded corals. Big white coral in the middle back is the skeleton of my Purple Stylo from my first crash over a year ago. Makes a good temporary fragish rack. My wife, who is NOT into reefing, saved it for me after finding it in my death bucket and washing it off.
Primary Alk consumer
Blue LED fun.
Pink Milli left, Palmer's Blue right, Big Valida below. To my eye pink glows pink, Palmers same, polyps of valida are invisible.
I've been trying to get the tank to settle down after the disastrous carbon dosing experiment.
The Lokani went through another round of RTN and stopped again. It's in back under lower light now and in the process I made two frags. One died, one lived, so now I'm at 2 frags plus what remains of the original colony.
My KH reached 7.0 a few days ago and I was happy I finally managed 7 ... a few days later it started to bother me since this tank hasn't hit 7 for months so I tested again, 9.1 KH! BAH! Doser turned off, Kalk diluted the first day, then resumed at full strength once I confirmed Alk was dropping at a decent rate. Since then I've bee obsessed with day vs night Alk usage so I'm doing multiple tests daily to try and figure out current daily usage plus day vs night usage. My concern is that with the Alk usage rising I'm actually becoming more unstable by dosing 24/7 rather than just during the daylight hours. THis is a meaningless fact in younger tanks but as coral volume increases and daily dosing increases these swings can become a real issue.
For the sake of discussion, lets say my daily Alk usage is 2 KH. If I dose that over 24 hours then my morning Alk will be 8, end of light cycle will be 7, and then it will climb to 8 by the next morning if we assume corals do not use any Alk at night (which is what many are confirming). This assumes I'm dosing enough for 1 KH during the 12 hour day and another 1 KH overnight so the drop is only half of the total daily usage.
Maybe 1 KH is no big deal, but what if My Alk usage is something crazy, like 6 KH daily?
Suddenly I'm doing daily swings from 9KH in the morning to 6KH in the evening. That's pretty flipping huge! As you can see, continuing 24 hour dosing and continuing to raise the amount as the tank grows actually decreases stability due to the difference in day/night usage.
That's my theory. I don't have an expensive 24/7 Alk tester but I am doing numerous tests here for the next day to see if I see the pattern. Because my KH spiked to 9 my doser is off but Kalk is still being added via my timed topoff every 15 minutes. It's saturated Kalk so using the calculator and figuring my usage is about .8 gallons daily, this equates to 0.6KH of Kalk added daily.
So far my daily measurements with Salifert, backed up by Hanna, are:
9.3 at 4pm
8.8 at 6:30pm
8.6 at 8:30pm
8.5 at 6AM (Kalk back to full strength, my estimate is + .3 to .4 KH overnight)
8.1 at 4PM
7.9 at 6:30PM
7.7 at 8:30PM
8.0 at 6:30AM
I expected Alk to rise due to Kalk dosing and it did. I expected up to .3 and testing twice I got 8.0 twice so I think this is a decent reading. There should have been some usage after the 8:30 reading due to the blue LEDs being on full blast until 9:30. Most likely I am dosing more Kalk than I thought, which is likely since it's a guess based on how long topoff lasts. 5 gallons last a little over 5 days. Remember I do timed topoff with Kalk, it's not float based, so dosing is consistent.
So, if all goes as expected this evenings Alk should be 7.2 KH, tomorrow morning 7.5, tomorrow evening 6.7 if I don't turn on the doser.
Running the calculator and getting the amount to raise Alk from 6.7 to 7.5 I get aprox 80ml (I'm using 140 gallons as tank volume + sump - equipment and rocks).
Doser is set to 120ml over 24 hours so what I think I will do is put it on a timer so it goes on Saturday at 10am and off at 10pm. This should dose 60ml which is not enough to fully maintain Alk. A safe start. If this works then in the end I will have more stable Alk by only dosing during lights on.
Of course this assumes that the Alk spike was short and not too damaging. Right now everything looks good but Alk spikes can show damage days or weeks later so we'll see.
What's left of the Lokani
After latest rescape and slight trim. I wanted to get more light in front to safe some dying/shaded corals. Big white coral in the middle back is the skeleton of my Purple Stylo from my first crash over a year ago. Makes a good temporary fragish rack. My wife, who is NOT into reefing, saved it for me after finding it in my death bucket and washing it off.
Primary Alk consumer
Blue LED fun.
Pink Milli left, Palmer's Blue right, Big Valida below. To my eye pink glows pink, Palmers same, polyps of valida are invisible.
Last edited:
bubbaque
Follow me on Instagram @ Bubbaquecorals
Mark, I've always wondered about the alk dipping during the day and rising at night. Some tanks with serious growth would have pretty large swings. I believe @Renton777 got the alk monitor and changed his dosing so it doesn't dip or rise during the day now.
@bubbaque speaks the truth. I have tweeked my dosing schedule a bit since this post: https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/rentons-custom-200.101447/page-28#post-4621975 , but it give you a good idea of the difference in Alk demand my tank has during the day vs. nigtht
OP
OP
That is fantastic info, thanks for stopping by and linking.
Mark - tank looks amazing. I'm glad you brought up this ALK swing theory. I have the GHL KH Director but haven't needed to hook it up yet as my build is new and not a lot of SPS yet. But now I'm glad I went the extra step on this front.
OP
OP
Thanks both.
I wish I could say the experiment proceeded as I wanted but we had storms Thursday night which knocked out power for 20 hours, it just came back on. I had to break out the Champion 1500 watt generator I bought in 2015 and thankfully it fired right up. Tank got down to 75.8 because I chose not to run the heaters. Everything looks fine, but you know how that goes. T5's are on now so Alk should drop, I will measure tonight and again tomorrow morning.
najer
Valuable Member
I bought a small generator on the day I had an extended power cut, lost way too many animals in my care that day.
England here, by next autumn I will have an independent battery backup for the tank, the tank will have a separate heater and power head hidden in the scape, in case of emergencies!.
England here, by next autumn I will have an independent battery backup for the tank, the tank will have a separate heater and power head hidden in the scape, in case of emergencies!
.
OP
OP
I bought a small generator on the day I had an extended power cut, lost way too many animals in my care that day.
England here, by next autumn I will have an independent battery backup for the tank, the tank will have a separate heater and power head hidden in the scape, in case of emergencies!
I expected to use the generator in the winter, not the summer! We ended up having a lot of wattage to spare so we powered a freezer and a light so we could play some games. It was fun in a way, though today I'm exhausted, probably because I was constantly worried the generator would run out of gas and the tank would die overnight.
I wish I got a generator with a big fuel tank, not this little 1.5 gallon thing.
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