Tank too clean?

[Josh567]

Hey guys.

I only have a few pieces of coral In my setup, and they all look good, but they have completely stopped growing. I have a couple hammer and frogspawn frags. A bubble coral, favia, and some acans. My gsp has turned more of a brown instead of green. I have been dosing vinegar to bring n and p down and it has worked well. I am just wondering if maybe it worked a little too well.

Parameters are:
N - 0
P - .01 Hanna ulr
Ca - 410
Alk - 8.4
Salinity 35 ppt

Lighting two kessil 160 tuna blue

Anybody have any thoughts?

Josh

 

[Ben.91]

Unless you have sps in your tank I wouldn't worry about dosing vinegar. Never heard of that method so I can't say if it has any side affects or not, but all of the corals you've listed will pretty much thrive with nitrates at or around 5-10ppm and phosphate shouldn't exceed .03 if you can help it. Hammers and frogspawn are slow growers. I would keep an eye out on the GSP and Acan colony. Those are the ones that grow rapid. In the end I would say yes, your tank is too clean lol

 

[Josh567]

I started dosing vinegar to see how well it worked bringing down n and p, before I went crazy adding coral. I have always wanted to have a mostly sps tank, but have always struggled with nitrates. No matter what i did they always stayed between 10-20. I've tried it all, algae scrubbers, more water changes, less rock, more flow, bigger skimmer, and when I was first starting out in the hobby I even got suckered into a sulfer nitrate reactor ($$$$). In under a month with vinegar, I've seen my tank go from 20-30 n and .08p to undetectable N and usually between .01 and .02 P. The only down side is everything seems to have stopped growing. I did cut the dose of vinegar in half to see if that makes any difference.

 

[Sully72]

Wow! I just bought RedSea's new NO3PO4X to do the same thing.

 

[organism]

In under a month with vinegar, I've seen my tank go from 20-30 n and .08p to undetectable N and usually between .01 and .02 P. The only down side is everything seems to have stopped growing. I did cut the dose of vinegar in half to see if that makes any difference.

Once your nutrients get low you need to start feeding more, it's the benefit of carbon dosing. I dump tons of food into my frag tank that gets vodka, no fish just corals that get fed like crazy. The display doesn't use vodka so I only sparingly feed the fish, it's a whole different type of maintenance once you've dialed in carbon dosing.

I stopped feeding my frag system recently to get rid of some bryopsis patches, accidentally bleached everything in the tank within a couple weeks from stripping the nutrients.

 

[Reef Frog]

The corals you list are not particularly fast growers IME. I've found a few favias to be medium fast growers however. How long ago did you start the vinegar dosing?

But my point was going to be that sometimes it difficult to perceive growth when you're looking at your tank every day. Sometimes I look at a picture from six months to a year ago am surprised at the growth.

 

[Josh567]

I have discovered that feeding more seems to help. My fish are certainly looking well fed, and I can even target feed the corals now without worrying about nutrients (within reason of course). I started dosing about two months ago. I was up to about 16 ml per day before I cut the dose in half. I finally settled out at 7.4 ml per day, and things seem to look better. N is still reading 0 and P still hovers between .01-.02, but now I have to scrape the glass with my mag scraper every other day, where before I went two weeks or more without needing to clean the glass.

That is also a great idea about taking a picture to monitor the growth. My wife things that the corals have gotten bigger, but she also doesn't sit and stare at the tank daily like I do.

 

[Raintree]

Once your nutrients get low you need to start feeding more, it's the benefit of carbon dosing. I dump tons of food into my frag tank that gets vodka, no fish just corals that get fed like crazy. The display doesn't use vodka so I only sparingly feed the fish, it's a whole different type of maintenance once you've dialed in carbon dosing.

I stopped feeding my frag system recently to get rid of some bryopsis patches, accidentally bleached everything in the tank within a couple weeks from stripping the nutrients.

+1. If either nitrate or phosphate is undetectable, you probably need to dial back on the carbon dosing until you get just-barely detectable nutrients, to be sure you're not overdosing carbon

 

[organism]

+1. If either nitrate or phosphate is undetectable, you probably need to dial back on the carbon dosing until you get just-barely detectable nutrients, to be sure you're not overdosing carbon

or up the feeding :thumbsup:

 

[aqua tech]

+1 :dance: