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- Feb 23, 2019
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Deal! Again, I really appreciate your help on this. I'll get the gfo going and will provide feedback on the results for the benefit of the community. Cheers!so the P battery i'm talking about is basically the accumulation of organic waste since when you first started the tank. the waste that's in the pores of the rocks, the P binding mechanism that's mentioned by other posters above. so in theory, perhaps every time you fed something, you put more P in than your animals can absorb, and the extra waste gets bound in the substrate and stored in the rock pores. this accumulates little by little, creating stores of P in the rock and sand. then every time something dies, if you don't quickly take it out, the dead flesh rots and get buried in the sand, thus increasing the storage of P (charging the battery).
for feeding fish - give them a variety - you can still feed mysis but rotate it with something else that's more plant/plankton based.
dose amino for your corals if you got a lot - but probably not necessary since your fish pee/poop is already good for corals - and you got a lot of fish.
live sand doesn't hurt. I never used bioblock so not sure about that product. But it still feels like you are trying to do too much too quickly - here you suggested doing 5 things - add sand, reduce feed, increasing filtration (chaeto mass), add bio block, add gfo. i get you want to fix it asap but for a tank that big, it truly takes months for any one little adjustment you make to show its full effect. doing too many things too quickly doesn't make your tank stablize faster and oftentimes has the opposite effect b/c we really don't fully understand all the intricate biochemical process and relationships our tank has. The closest analogy i can make is - you are trying to untangle a ball of yarn that has multiple open threads - pulling at one thread tip is gonna be slow to untangle, but at least you'll be able trace thru the thread. Pulling at all of them at the same time MIGHT make you untangle faster, but more likely will make the yarn knot even tighter.
That's why i suggested only changing feeding and letting chaeto grow out for couple of months. If you go the GFO route then that would be the only change I would do now, b/c gfos can strip out P so effectively that i'd want to monitor and keep everything else status quo for now.