How old is your tank? Also, what do you feed specifically? I’ve found that frozen food is really necessary daily for consistent nutrients. I used Rods food daily for my tank. My tank is only 10 months old and I’m getting nitrates of 15 and Phos of 0.14 consistently now. It took until probably the 6 or 7 months mark before I finally started seeing consistent nitrates
It’s pretty new honestly only 2 months or so but I started it up with a lot of mature rock and media. I understand it’s not completely mature yet until atleast 6mo to a year. Specifically I feed PE frozen mysis and TDO chroma boost for pellets
Exact same. My tank is almost 9 months old and nitrates would disappear overnight at times. Started feeding super heavy and now nitrates staying steady around 5-10
Okay. Yeah I ended up reading it to be nothing but beneficial as you’ve said. Thanks
I’ll post results once I start dosing. I believe I should receive it this coming week.
I would NOT recommend dosing nitrates at this point. A new tank needs to go through it's own cycle without complicating things with dosing chemicals.
Right I mean, I don’t see it at chasing numbers, but keeping nitrate from being 0 to prevent issues like Dino’s or coral loss.
The problem is that your nitrate is not truly zero. I would bet money that there is algae and/or other organisms living in your tank (probably on your rock work) right now that are using the nitrates up and preventing you from being able to detect it in your testing. I remember when my tank was 2-3 months old I had this layer of thin, fine brown algae on the bottom of my tank (it's barebottom), that stayed there for weeks, if not months. During that time my nitrates were always zero. As soon as my snails and fish finally rid the tank of that algae, that's when I started seeing my nitrates test above 0. It took months for that to happen.
Agreed here….i’m yet to see an aquarium with fed fish that coral and biodiversity is so dense that nitrogen becomes limited. Po4, on the other hand, I have witnessed firsthand becoming limited. My aquarium where nitrogen requirements are large and exist even beyond the confines of the glass box is not nitrogen limited based on ICP testing and experience. Despite careful feeding, a moderate fish population, active filtration, and consistent maintenance my tank with undetectable hobby tested no3 is thriving.
Sure, but a new tank has lots of various stages of succession to go through still, all of which can cause dramatic fluctuations in nutrient levels. That's why I treat a new tank differently. Personally, I see dosing nitrate as a thing to do when you're trying to dial in perfect parameters on a mature tank where all other parameters have proven to be mostly stable for quite some time. I prefer the keep it simple approach wherever possible, but that's just me. My tank never got dinos during the early stages, which I think has to do mostly with oversized UV sterilizer use and regularly dosing Microbacter7. I did get a brief red slime algae phase, but was able to beat that with a turkey baster daily for a week or two and it never got out of control. The UV sterilizer did the rest and again, dosing beneficial bacteria.
A little lower with my daily consumption….at first I was hovering around 2.4 and rising .1-.3 daily,
Before I started dosing nitrates my phosphates were .2ish, once I started dosing nitrates my phosphates were consumed very quickly
