PO4 from. 22 to 0 in 24 hours possible?

exnisstech

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Hey all. I had undetectable or bareley detectable nitrates for over a year in this tank. I started dosing sodium nitrate and getting that dialed in. I'm at 2.2 from a high of 5.2 (using a Hanna checker) in 2 days without dosing. I was dosing 20ml of my solution to get it up so I'm going to try 10ml daily and see if I can keep it stable. Now on to the phosphates which were at. 22 yesterday. I added 10 tbl spoons of gfo (brs bulk stuff) in a reactor yesterday. It's at a nice slow tumble. Water volume is around 40 gal total. Today PO4 is showing 0 on my Hanna checker after only running gfo for 24 hours. It's not the ultra low checker. Is it possible the gfo removed that much phosphate in that short of time? If so should I pull it and just keep testing to see how fast it rises then try to dial in an amount of gfo to run. What I'm trying to accomplish is a sps dominant tank so I know stability is key and all my other parameters are good and stable. With the super low nitrates frags were doing hohum. Not dying but not thriving either thats why I started dosing the sodium Nitrate. Rocks are covered in hair algae which I believe is from the high phosphate and also I believe . 22 is high for corals also. Just trying to put together a game plan here and not kill everything except the hair alage. I do like to keep things as simple as possible and am not a big number chaser. Just want a nice stable environment to grow out all my frags. I only have 2 fish in the tank but do feed frozen mysis and frozen LRS reef frenzy twice a day with the return off so the LPS in there get fed also. Any input frome those of you with more experienced than myself?
 

Biglew11

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I would keep the gfo offline for now.

If you were at undetectable levels for a while your sand and live rock are going to bind alot of phosphates for a while.

In my tank it took about 1.5 weeks of dosing to .1 ppm 2 times a day for me to see residual phosphates. And abou 1.5 - 2 for them to become somewhat stable.
 
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exnisstech

exnisstech

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I would keep the gfo offline for now.

If you were at undetectable levels for a while your sand and live rock are going to bind alot of phosphates for a while.

In my tank it took about 1.5 weeks of dosing to .1 ppm 2 times a day for me to see residual phosphates. And abou 1.5 - 2 for them to become somewhat stable.
Thanks I thought I had read that when dosing for nitrates it can cause phosphates to decrease but I've read so much lately its becoming a jumble in my brain :face-with-spiral-eyes:. Phos was at. 43 and came down to. 22 on its own after I started the sodium Nitrate so perhaps I should have waited a while longer after starting the sodium Nitrate to worry about the PO4.
 

ZombieEngineer

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Kind of what Im thinking I should have done. Do you run yours 24-7 or as needed?
As needed and use sparingly only when skimmer and refugium aren't enough to keep up. I recently made the mistake of letting nitrate and phosphate get too low from GFO and ended up getting ostreopsis dinos.
 
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exnisstech

exnisstech

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As needed and use sparingly only when skimmer and refugium aren't enough to keep up. I recently made the mistake of letting nitrate and phosphate get too low from GFO and ended up getting ostreopsis dinos.
Thanks. This tank has been running so clean for over 3 years that I've never even had a skimmer. Just ran chaeto and that's it. Then the chaeto all died after doing so well I was able to sell it. That's when I started scratching my head. I think I upset things a while back when I pulled a bunch of LPS to move to another tank then swapped out the rocks with some from my other system just to get a different look (which I'm not happy with lol).
 

jx.reef

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10 tablespoons of GFO (140 grams) in a 40 gallon tank is a gigantic amount of GFO and would easily zero out your phosphate. I’m running only 75-100 grams in a 100g tank. That’s enough to drop my levels by about 0.2ppm over two days.
 

jx.reef

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That's what I get for reading the directions :rolling-on-the-floor-laughing:
Yeah definitely don’t go with the BRS direction on GFO lol. Same thing if you end up touching NOPOX down the line. I’d start at 1/4th the recommended dose and work up if needed
 

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