Carbon dosing problems

[5to9design]

Hoping someone can point me in the correct direction. I have a Nuvo 20 stocked with a watchman goby, a clown fish and clean up crew. I have had a lot of issues with nitrate control over the 1 year life of the tank. I had found good success with dosing vodka to slow down the production of nitrate but unfortunately once I got to week 7 of the carbon dosing schedule I had a massive "œbacterial bloom". There was clear snot on everything and even going as far as to clog the return pump. Since then I have started dosing microbacter7 and went back to week 7 of dosing amount, however even with the microbacter and the lower dosing amount the bacterial bloom is still looming in some parts of the tank. Meanwhile nitrate is climbing at about 1ppm per day. I do 30% water changes every 4-6 days to keep nitrate under 15ppm. It seems like I can't up the carbon dosing anymore without bacterial blooms but I really don't want to stay on this ridiculous water change schedule.


Side note: I am running a reef glass skimmer, spot feeding the two fish every other day and testing with a Hanna hr nitrate checker.


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[SantaMonica]

A few things. Your phosphate might be bottomed out, not allowing the bacteria to consume the nitrate. Or, you reduced nutrients too far, too fast, and killed some microbes or periphyton, which is now decaying and putting nutrients into the water.

I would stop dosing, and see where N and P even out to, before doing anything else.

 

[5to9design]

I've been monitoring phosphate and it has been pretty steady between .03-.07. As for the kill off, I manually removed probably about 75% of the bacterial snot so I guess there could be some die off but for the most part what's left seems to be staying where it is. I ordered some seachem matrix hoping maybe more surface area will help.


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