Phosphate Control

[accelaraptor]

Whats the best method for controlling phosphate levels in a nano. I'm currently fighting off a cyano outbreak through lowering my day light hours and frequent (every 2-3 days) 15-20 % water changes. I am hoping to avoid having this problem in the future. Should I only target feed a day or two before a water change?

 

[sp4zzy]

Are you blasting off your rock with a baster or anything before doing water changes? And what kind of substrate/how deep are you using? If it's reasonably doable, stirring up the substrate a bit before doing a change will help release some trapped nasties.

If bad goes to worse, get some GFO. I've been running ChemiPure Elite for a couple months now and my Phosphates lowered significantly, even with a deep sand bed.

 

[ReefWreak]

GFO is always the go-to answer. How is your algae situation?

I always feed just enough that only a pellet or two hit my sand bed, but all of the fishes eat (I have 4 fishes), so I'm pretty strict with feeding. If you're strict with feeding, you shouldn't have a problem. I feed frozen occasionally, and haven't had any cyano issues.

Cyano can be hard to nail down. It may be solved by removing phosphates, but it may not be. An alternative to GFO that I'm doing currently is adding bacteria in the form of Brightwell Microbacter7, which are supposed to compete with cyanoalgae for nutrients. It's usually used while carbon dosing because often the nitrates will be used up before phosphate, which will lead to cyano eating the remaining phosphate.

And if you absolutely can't remove it through the aforementioned methods, then there's always plan B, chemiclean. It'll work, but it'll kill a significant amount of bacteria in your tank. It won't cause a cycle or anything bad like that, but we should encourage bacterial competition and diversity in our tanks whenever possible.

 

[sp4zzy]

Agreeing with ReefWreak, don't use ChemiClean unless it's a total last-resort. Not sure if it was the product itself or the Dino outbreak I got immediately after use, but something nearly completely wiped my corals out. It definitely got rid of the cyano though :-/

 

[donut0079]

I had a similar problem in my tank and the game changer for me was flow. I found that a lot of food was building up on my rocks that I did not realize. When I increased my flow with an MP10 a cloud of food came off the rocks and my nitrates and phosphates dropped over the following weeks.

 

[ReefWreak]

I had a similar problem in my tank and the game changer for me was flow. I found that a lot of food was building up on my rocks that I did not realize. When I increased my flow with an MP10 a cloud of food came off the rocks and my nitrates and phosphates dropped over the following weeks.

That's actually an excellent point. While I've never had food just hang around on my rocks, the week my vortech went out and all I had for flow was just my return, most of my corals browned out. I still didn't measure any nitrates or phosphates (or any higher than normal), but it was a painful reminder of how important flow is in our reef tanks.

It's worth also pointing out that high flow and aggressive skimming can (and should) be used to combat nitrates and phosphates, as the food and other nutrients in suspension should be skimmed out and removed from the tank before it has the chance to break down in the water column, and then taken up by algae or cyanobacteria.

 

[accelaraptor]

Thanks for all of the advice. I've got a fine sand bed of about 2 inches and besides the cyano I get a little bit of hair algae on my glass from time to time. I'm going to definitely keep my rocks cleaner and stir up parts of the sand bed at a time before water changes. See what progress I can make before adding anything else, but I think the bacteria addition is a cool option