Triton DOC test TNb high

[lapin]

Here is my results. I have high TNb. I assume it is common. I dont have any real issues with my tank. What other source do they want me to add to the fill in the blank box? (From other source). My nitrate test results ? What does High TNb mean?

 

[rkpetersen]

Their website is very confusing.

TNb is Total Nitrogen bound, meaning combination of nitrate and organic nitrogen, excluding dissolved nitrogen gas. Elevated TNb is very common.

The 23.43 is the maximum amount of nitrate that your tank could have.
In the next line, you enter the actual nitrate reading at the time the sample was taken. You'll notice that you can't entire a higher number than the number above.
If you didn't actually test your nitrate at the time, or your test isn't very accurate, this won't work as well, although you can still enter an estimate.
After you enter the nitrate, the second bar will change to show the relative amounts of nitrate and organic nitrogen in your system.
Triton recommends a ratio of nitrate to organic nitrogen as depicted in the first bar, about 3:1 nitrate to organic nitrogen.
How they arrived at this ratio is unclear. It seems reasonable but I doubt the science behind it.

Then, in the next section, you enter the corresponding phosphorus or phosphate level, either from your own test or a simultaneous ICP-OES.
After you enter the phosphorus/phosphate, the bars below will change. Again, this has to do with Triton ratios being the supposed optimal state.
Here's a pdf on Triton ratios if you want to spend more time thinking about it.

 

[lapin]

Their website is very confusing.
TNb is Total Nitrogen bound, meaning combination of nitrate and organic nitrogen, excluding dissolved nitrogen gas. Elevated TNb is very common.
The 23.43 is the maximum amount of nitrate that your tank could have.
In the next line, you enter the actual nitrate reading at the time the sample was taken. You'll notice that you can't entire a higher number than the number above.
If you didn't actually test your nitrate at the time, or your test isn't very accurate, this won't work as well, although you can still enter an estimate.
After you enter the nitrate, the second bar will change to show the relative amounts of nitrate and organic nitrogen in your system.
Triton recommends a ratio of nitrate to organic nitrogen as depicted in the first bar, about 3:1 nitrate to organic nitrogen.

Thanks
It was around 12 when I sent the sample. So its about a 50/50 ratio

 

[stacksoner]

Their website is very confusing.

+1 I still have no idea what my NDOC results mean. It looks like it was made by someone who has been so close to this testing for so long that they forgot nobody else knows what their acronyms and reference formulas mean

 

[Dkeller_nc]

What does High TNb mean?

Well, to put it nicely - nothing. It's taken quite a long time (perhaps the last 20 years) to nail down what a particular nitrate and/or phosphate level in the tank water means to a reefer. And even then, you'll see lots of disagreement about what an "optimal" level is.

When this was announced a few months ago, many of us with a scientific background were skeptical, as it certainly appeared that Triton was simply mining their database and trying to correlate "successful reef tank" and test results. This, in and of itself, is a valid scientific technique for determining potential strong correlations that warrant further investigation. The difficulty is that data mining is just the starting point, as the potential for "correlation without causation" also needs to be assessed to generate valid conclusions.

There's also the matter of modeling the results of one type of system and then trying to apply it to another. A perfect example of this is trying to mimic the dissolved inorganic nutrient concentrations of a thriving natural reef. Nitrate and phosphate concentrations on a pristine outer reef in the Pacific are likely to be exceedingly low - well below the range of most hobbyist test kits. Yet it's incorrect to think that such a natural reef is "low nutrient". On the contrary, there's an enormous nutrient flux through a reef like that in the form of living creatures (especially at night) that the corals and other critters feed on.

That's impossible to duplicate in our tanks, and if we try to duplicate the low inorganic nutrient concentrations, most of us wind up starving and killing our corals.