Nutrients Drop When Dosing?

penguinexdeus · Sep 16, 2023

Need some help...

After struggling for months to get nutrients up and beating dinos, I was finally in a good spot where I wanted to be around 10 nitrate and 0.09 phosphate.

Last couple weeks numbers were starting to fall and earlier in week testing had me at about 5 nitrate and 0.7 phosphate. I dosed neonitro and nyos phosphate+ to try and bring back to where I was. Dose should have increased nitrate by 2 and phosphate by 0.02. I tested again next day and nitrate hadn't moved, phosphate had dropped to about 0.04. I dosed more of each and today I have 8 Nitrate and 0 phosphate.

Is there an issue with dosing both at same time? I want to bring up slow but it seems like phosphate keeps dropping... is there any correlation to one going up and other going down or is one maybe making the other more 'useable?'

I use calcium reactor and Kalk. Skimmer and fuge. I reduced fuge light hours a day or two ago and just turned off skimmer now.

Any thoughts?

The_Paradox · Sep 16, 2023

Do you have a decent amount of coral? Test 30 minutes after dosing and see where you are. Sounds like you just need to dose more. Also try to spread out dosing as much as possible.

penguinexdeus · Sep 16, 2023

The_Paradox said:
Do you have a decent amount of coral? Test 30 minutes after dosing and see where you are. Sounds like you just need to dose more. Also try to spread out dosing as much as possible.

Yes, packed with lots of frags.

Just throwing me off since for weeks phosphate/ nitrate was dropping slowly and i don't regularly dose it. Thursday night i was at 4.1 Nitrate/ 0.07 phosphate, I dosed Neonitro to try and bring it up and then last night (Friday) was at 4.6 Nitrate and 0.02 phosphate. Dosed more Neonitro and also put in the phosphate and now today i'm at 8 Nitrate/ 0 phosphate... Seems like that's a lot of phosphate to be taken up in 2/3 days when i've been at 0.09 consistently almost for a few months.