youcallmenny

If you go the dosing route and use soda ash for your alkalinity, that raises your ph, which is pretty cool.

Randall is right. They make small reactors for small tanks. You can set up automated dosing with dosing pumps or timers and pumps. That's what I do on my ~140g system. It's really just a matter of preference or which one you feel more comfortable with.

Oh yikes. Thank you for running this experiment, I really hope it works to rid your tank of this stuff. It's awesome to see a new potential solution presenting itself. I've tried the tech m and the vibrant solutions. Neither one even made the algae flinch.

Seconding Bert, can we see some before pictures please? I'm following along.

Thanks for the pictures and the frags Bert! The meeting was a blast and the photography discussion was awesome. I definitely learned a few things about my DSLR. Let me know if you'd like to meet up and I'll get you that OME frag!

Good plan! I wish you luck with it. Andy warned me about the nopox and he was absolutely right. It's really, really effective. So effective that if you inadvertently slam your nitrates down so fast that your phosphates are higher (ratio-wise, po4 levels are obviously much less), you'll get to enjoy a cyano outbreak. Just be careful to dose the recommended amount and test every day or other day. Once our rock quits spewing nitrates, I think it'll be easier to take longer term steps. Your sps is doing exactly what mine is from the sound of it. It's looking happy so you're probably already on the right track!

What's different about your sps? When my nitrates started spiking, the majority of the sps went brown. I guess this is a pretty normal response from some reading I did. Excess photosynthetic algae is created as a defense mechanism and that algae is brown. The ATS suggestion is probably a solid long term answer. Something like nopox is a short term answer but in my case is allowing a nitrate 'reset' so I can bring levels down and begin better husbandry practices.

Nopox is already chipping my nitrate level down pretty steadily. I'm somewhere between 10 and 20ppm after a couple days use. I've also drastically cut back on feeding. Your tank is still looking great despite the nutrient level!

Thank you for hosting, Holly! It was a pleasure to see your tanks in person.

Those that grow copious amounts of macro, what sort of lights are you growing it with?

Yea but now frag individual heads without splintering the bone.

There are but I'm already in Portland coming from Salem. I can bring you one next month if you're still interested.

Your custom title of 'All Around Great Guy' plus this post made me laugh quite a bit.

No worries man, I'll be there for the duration with my cooler.

An update: the algae came right back to my sump after the sterilization and dark period. My nitrates have been high so I'm going to focus on bringing those down to undetectable levels instead of fighting the bryopsis.

The mantis would be awesome. I've looked in to it in the past and the glass breaking seems to be a bit a of a myth.

Sean, how about some red monti cap and ora green apple birdsnest? Both super easy. Could probably bring some purple digi too if you'd like. \/\/\/ You got it!

Paypal would be my suggestion too. Definitely an inconvenient function but honestly, given the prices we all pay for gear and livestock, I consider the fee pretty negligible.

It's not in your best interest. It's incentive to become a paid member.

Barring your kit being expired as suggested, the Salifert one has the exact same increments. 10/25/50/100 etc. It does however also do high res at the same time which is nice. You just look at it from the side and you can also check <10ppm. Not sure if yours does that.

Thanks for the warning Andy, I appreciate it. I was planning on a half dose to start but I will probably use a quarter after your warning. There's plenty of cautionary tales out there about slamming nitrates down too quickly. I'm only using it because I believe the root cause (drastic overfeeding) has been addressed. The idea is to just get it lowered down to a desirable level and then stop use and maintain that level through improved husbandry.

You might just drop a heater in your water resevoir the night prior to a water change. That's what I've been doing and after setting the temperature on said heater, my tank temperature doesn't vary at all. I'm in the same nitrate boat at the moment. I did 2 40% water changes back to back this weekend which helped, added another ~40lbs of live rock to my display, and am waiting on an order of Red Sea No3Po4-X (NOPOX). I also was only using half of a 2LF media reactor full of large pore lignite carbon. I doubled this so that the reactor is completely full and changed every 2 weeks. In addition to all this, I drastically cut back my feeding schedule. It went from ~40ppm to ~20ppm already without the the Red Sea product. I will update you in this thread on what it does after I've used it for a week or two, if you're interested. It's supposed to be pretty effective. I'm aiming for <5ppm. Good luck in your fight with this! I'll be following along.

Very impressive. What exactly does the sediment tank do?

When fish die, they get eaten very quickly by the clean up crew. Early on I lost a sailfin tang to a bully of a yellow tang and when I searched for him one morning, all I found was a bit of skull and spine. He was stripped down within hours.

I have two of these mounted over my fuge. They are really, really good about growing macro. https://www.amazon.com/LUMENTEK-Aquarium-Light-Lighting-Aquariums/dp/B01G4BRRN6/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1484848206&sr=8-6&keywords=led+bulb+for+refugium