I have a dilemma, for several years I have struggled with nitrates. I switched to frozen food (reef frenzy) from pellets and I think that played a small roll; I also have more decorative rock (carib sea) than old live rock from when I started my reef tanks about 12 years ago. The live rock was originally purchased for a 75g (a mix of fuji live and TBS stuff). I am sure I have less than 50 lbs of my original live rock left. My tank today is 500g and most of my rock is carib sea...absolutely love the caverns and arches I can create with it but I feel that is the #1 cause of my nutrient struggle.
If I had my way i'd go sandless but I have 1-2" for my remaining green wrasse. When he dies I will remove sand but he is going strong on 10 years old so he gets to call the shots.
I am light on corals as I had a pump break and caused a mass die off, but now that my tank has finally rebalanced (zoas, monit and goni pot still huge and growing my coraline has also taken off) I find myself struggling again with nutrients and it's honestly been this way for years since I started making heavy investments into the structural carib sea life rock. I want to keep the useful pieces but start to rip my base structure out and replace with live rock. Is this a feasible solution? I think I will swap roughly 200lbs of rock out.
My other alt is carbon dosing and while this worked in the past I had to dose the heck out of phosphates and that eventually catches up with me because I feel I have to dose so much once carbon dosing starts because I am so low to begin with the nitrates dont drop until I have enough p04. This comes back to bite me because my life rock starts to really suck it up and eventually I have algae issues on my rocks. It's a never end cycle of disruption.
Thoughts from some folks who experienced this before?
IMO water changes are useless as they seem a temp fix, this is a large tank and I just simply don't want to be spending $300 monthly and using all my time to change water every day. I loathe them, absolutely loathe making 150 gallons of salt to do a sizeable change on my volume. It's not a long term feasible solution.
If I had my way i'd go sandless but I have 1-2" for my remaining green wrasse. When he dies I will remove sand but he is going strong on 10 years old so he gets to call the shots.
I am light on corals as I had a pump break and caused a mass die off, but now that my tank has finally rebalanced (zoas, monit and goni pot still huge and growing my coraline has also taken off) I find myself struggling again with nutrients and it's honestly been this way for years since I started making heavy investments into the structural carib sea life rock. I want to keep the useful pieces but start to rip my base structure out and replace with live rock. Is this a feasible solution? I think I will swap roughly 200lbs of rock out.
My other alt is carbon dosing and while this worked in the past I had to dose the heck out of phosphates and that eventually catches up with me because I feel I have to dose so much once carbon dosing starts because I am so low to begin with the nitrates dont drop until I have enough p04. This comes back to bite me because my life rock starts to really suck it up and eventually I have algae issues on my rocks. It's a never end cycle of disruption.
Thoughts from some folks who experienced this before?
IMO water changes are useless as they seem a temp fix, this is a large tank and I just simply don't want to be spending $300 monthly and using all my time to change water every day. I loathe them, absolutely loathe making 150 gallons of salt to do a sizeable change on my volume. It's not a long term feasible solution.
