Picture and video of my 7 year H. magnifica

[delphinus]

I did try an 8g bucket full of aragonite sugar sand to about 6" from the top. Ironically the nitrates were at their worst when I had that remote sandbed online. I don't know why. I even tried growing mangroves in it at one point, in the hopes that the roots would pull up any nutrients bound deep in the sand, but they did not take.

I also tried a sulfur denitrator and it too would not cause the nitrates to come down.

The only thing I could really do with any effectiveness was large wholesale water changes but the effect was only temporary of course.

I got to wondering if I could have had interference of some kind on the test kits, or if it was simply an artifact of this species - there's a thread in here from a year or two ago where I was asking if anyone else with H. mag suffered chronic nitrates to the same degree as I was having, but the responses seemed to span the spectrum .. ie, some people do, but some don't. So it likely is a more simple explanation.

I did try a more minimalist approach with the amount of rock after reading a few articles by Richard Harker. I'm sort of wondering if that's the real culprit. The tank has slightly less than 1 lb/gallon. Maybe it's just too much bioload for the volume.

Nowadays there is more rock in the sump, the skimmer is modded to be a meshwheel, and I've been running Polyplaps. The nitrates actually had gone to zero at one point but I suspect they have bounced back up due to me trying to keep two non-photosynthetic gorgonians. They vigorously eat Cyclops-eeze so I do feed some every 1-2 days. If the tank can run at a "cruising altitude" of between 5 to 10 ppm NO3, I can live with that (it's far better than 80!!). I test NO3 every week to ensure that there isn't an upward trend.

 

[Mojo Jojo]

:thumbsup:

 

[garygb]

delphinus, have you tried chaeto? I have a deep sand bed and that keeps my nitrates undetectable, but I also have chaeto and lots of folks swear by it. I know a deep sand bed in the display will keep nitrates down, but that would ruin the whole look of your tank--and clearly what you're doing is working. But, if you wanted to add chaeto to your sump, you would just need a PC, preferably 6700K, and it grows like crazy.

 

[delphinus]

Thanks - actually I do grow chaeto on this tank. However it's just not really at a scale large enough to make a huge dent. What I've done is taken an old Hagen Aquaclear hang-on filter, and popped 2x9PC fixture on top of it, and grow the chaeto in there. It just sits on the sump instead of the main tank. I prune it back every couple of weeks.

Problem is it's an Aquaclear 100. So not a whole lot of space. A bigger grow out area with larger lights would likely do better.

 

[garygb]

Yeah, you most likely need a larger ball of it than can be contained in an Aquaclear 100 chamber. It doesn't appear to matter, your anemone looks great. I assume you have a good quality protein skimmer. As I'm sure you know, that catches lots of nitrogenous waste before it even has a chance to enter the nitrogen cycle.