Curious, what effects of nopox have you seen that make you believe your corals dislike it?
Me too! I’ve been using NOPOX and I’m loving it. It’s like vodka dosing.
May be a reason but not always. I used 5 tiimes the amount ran a slow tumble for months a fast tumble for months and gave up after a year and a half. Heard same story many times. I think as most things in this hobby depends on the tank.
Zoas started to shrink and recede, hammer lost a head, goniopora don’t extend as much, some trumpets bleached out. I started dialing back the nopox and all corals looked better, so I’m sure it’s the nopox. I dialed back again today, so I’m only dosing 4ml per day now, and will cut it out completely after a couple weeks.
I never tried Microbacter. I don’t know where I read it, but someone said you could use it to speed up the biopellet bacteria colonization.
My nutrients had always been in the 60 / 0.6 range, and the corals looked great, until going down the nopox path. Was just trying to make the fish happier. They are still fine, but coral didn’t like it at all, and were better at 0.6 with no nopox. My alk had always been steady at 9. Also used a co2 scrubber to oxygenate.
If you try it as I did you probably will then be able to lower nopox dose or help seed the biopellets. That was the difference maker for me after long time struggling with high nitrates. One other note it got my phos so low that nitrates stopped coming down so when I put a little more phos in kicked up again but you have more than enough phos. So can just do the heavy dose of Microbactor 7. Worth a try with no risk
Thanks, I’m looking into this. If I proceed, would turning off the nopox be advisable, since I would then be doing biopellets, nopox, and microbacter at the same time? Also, microbacter has 2 recipes, for either medium to high-nutrient systems (5ml per 25g) or low-nutrient (5ml per 50g). Considering my situation, which would you suggest?
Maybe when you said heavy dose, the high-nutrient recipe is what you meant (5ml per 25g). I’m just being cautious, on edge after seeing the nopox damage. I’d hate to go big willy on something else and run into more issues.
This is what I would do and did myself. Dose the high nutrient amount daily for at least several days. Continue dosing the nopox and run the biopellet at same time with the long term goal I think you mentioned to get off the nopox. When you see the Nitrates start coming down, slowly lower the nopox dose over a period until slowly on biopellets alone if that is what you want to accomplish. Some may say you are competing the bacteria but this worked for me.
