MammothReefer
Active member
Yes it's a bad assumption. I ran into that same problem it takes a few weeks of testing, and adjusting to find that balance. Things will change in your tank if one week your phosphates are up you could have a stunt in growth and you will use less alk/calc.. then the next week you can do a water change things will improve you can see a growth spike and things will drop. I've found (and am finding out). That you need to just keep testing looking for patterns and adjust for the median. I had a harder time getting this current tank to stabilize then any other tank I've owned since I used to run a calc reactor. I tried 4-5 different methodologies for testing and adjusting and I'm hoping I have things figured out now (seems to have stabilized..2 weeks now w/out any change.) I find sometimes things just get out of wack and you are shooting for X and Y, but your water won't stabilize until it's at Y, Z ..it's times like that you just kinda do a big water change get all your params as close to your salt level as possible and try to shoot for stability from there. I found out that hard way if you try to get a stable tank out of an unstable set of water params.. you just end up testing every day and pulling your hair out.
see my tank charts for reference.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiJkwwBTLCi7dG12ZFhsTXBGTUFZellSWTZ3QkhiLVE
