John Vinson

I went with this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FBK3QK/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

With everything plugged into it (heater, pumps, lights, etc), it lasts 1-2 hours (can probably get it to last longer if just the pumps and heater are going).  Anything longer than that I switch to the generator for the whole house.

So a few months ago I finally tossed the API kits that were saying my nitrates and phosphates were zero (Hanna had NO3 at 100+, and PO4 at 0.90). I almost tried NOPOX for the first time, but went with your recommendations to stick to the water changes and add some GFO.  I also added a "mini refugium", and it all seems to be working too well now.  I still need to bring my PO4 down a bit (.15 yesterday), but my nitrates have been 0.0 for a few weeks now.  I've had the skimmer off for a week, increased the fish feedings, and started dosing NeoNitro to try and get them up to around 10-15.  Nothing seems to work though.  I also tried dosing some AB+, but it started to crank up the green hair algae growth, so I stopped.  

I'm not chasing numbers, as half my softies don't seem to be doing well and are normally pretty hardy (GSP, Xenia, kalaidascope polyps, etc).  Anything else I could be missing?  I haven't done a water change in 2 weeks, as I'm hoping that may bring the NO3 up a bit.  However, I noticed it dropped my salinity down (1.022, where it's normally 1.026). Could that be part of the problem?  Other parameters include:

Alk: 8.6, Calc: 498, Mag: 1194, Ph: 8.1, temp: 79

Thanks for the advice!

I'm in

PM sent

19 hours ago, Blue Z Reef said:

My quick 2 cents 😁

 

NoPox works well for what it does, however, most reefers in your situation freak out and dose a lot, don’t monitor their levels enough while doing the dosing, and end up zeroing out either nitrate or phosphate (rarely both though, which creates a whole new issue). In my opinion that is way worse (and has a longer recovery time for the corals) than just taking it slow and using some additional methods for reduction.

I’m assuming you don’t have a heavily stocked SPS tank or your corals would be looking sad (or possibly just not the colors they should be). However, in my mixed reef (heavily LPS based), I’ve seen levels close to those with little issue. I would be taking steps to lower them, but keep it gradual. 

So if I was in your boat, I would probably implement a few methods.

 

1. Regular bacteria dosing (such as with MB7 or Prodibio Bio Digest). Set reminders to keep up on it or use a doser (where applicable)

 

2. Rowaphos is great, but again, take it slow and monitor. Pull back or remove when you start getting into the sub .1 level and see what the tank does.

 

3. Skimmer - are you running one? Is it performing as it should? Products like NoPox rely on a skimmer to work properly so make sure that is in place prior.

 

4. when things get out of wack ratio wise, look into products that tackle phosphate or nitrate independently (like rowa or BW Phosphat-E). You could even end up at zero and have to dose to get back to where you need.

 

5. Think about adding some bio materials if you don’t have them already. I run marinepure blocks and spheres but there are other options available now as well (marinepure gets a bad wrap for Aluminum leaching but ultimately doesn’t affect anything I’ve seen).

6. check source water, make sure phosphates aren’t coming from your RODI filters/DI being old!

 

good luck! If you take nothing else away, just take it slow and use slightly under the manufactures dosages and see how your tank reacts first.

Thanks for taking the time to run it all down!  I am running a skimmer (I've attached a recirculating CO2 scrubber to it, so my Ph is finally starting to slowly rise).  I had a disastrous attempt at raising the Ph by dosing Kalkwasser to my ATO, which eventually shot my Alk over 11, so I'm slowly recovering from that mess.  I do have some bio materials (I have the ceramic rings in a bag in one of my media rack slots) and I initially added some API starter bacteria when I first got the tank going, but haven't thought to dose more bacteria (I dose Alk/Calc as well as Phytoplankton right now).  Also, I'm going to be adding a "mini-refugium" to my media rack (just like this guy did -

I just did a water change and the P04 stayed the same (as expected), but the nitrates came down a fair amount (73.1 to 61.0), so I'm going to continue with water changes every 3 or 4 days until I get them down to a better level (shooting for around 10 right now).  Also, I have been doing just straight water changes instead of vacuuming/cleaning the sand, so my next water change is going to include a good cleaning of the sand.  I know the mini-refugium idea may not help to bring the nitrates down much, but anything helps and it should help to continue bringing my Ph up as well.  

So with your advice, I'm going to add a small bag of rowaphos to my media rack, and start dosing some MB7, in addition to the water changes/sand cleaning and hopefully I get this under control.  Thanks again for the help!

Juan was very gracious with his time, helping out a newbie with good advice as well as some great deals....thanks again!

On 2/14/2022 at 6:27 PM, Lexinverts said:

The first thing you'll probably want to address is why they got so high in the first place. Are you feeding lots of pellets? If so, I would back off the pellets and feed mostly frozen mysis and nori. I almost exclusively feed these two foods to my tanks.

NoPox isn't the greatest stuff in my view. It always led to other problems when I used it. If you have a RS250 you could easily do some large water changes to get nitrates down as a first step. Doing regular water changes will help keep your nitrates in check long term, as well. Keeping phosphates down usually requires a little more than that. To bring down phosphates in my tanks, I run some Rowaphos in a filter sock.

In my experience, an oversized skimmer will do a good job at controlling nitrates, but not phosphates. The Red Sea 250 only has an adequate skimmer, so probably regular water changes are in your future.....But having some large soft corals such as large Tyree green toadstools can help lower nitrates quickly in some systems. A big coral population in general will utilize nitrates help to keep them in check. I am currently dosing nitrates in all of my tanks because my corals use them up so fast that they quickly go to 0. I still have to use chemical media to lower phosphates, however.

A refugium with chaeto can also help reduce nitrates, but doesn't tend to do that much for phosphates. And I'm not sure that you could run enough chaeto in your back chamber to make a difference for nitrates either.

In a RS250, you could put some Rowaphos in a filter bag and add that to the media rack in the back chamber. Be careful with Rowaphos, though, as it can pull phosphate out of your water very quickly. You want to do it gradually, and under-dose what it says in the instructions. Use Hanna Phosphate and Nitrate high range checkers to track your progress.

Very important.....keep the ratio of nitrates to phosphates roughly 100:1. As an example, that would be nitrate of 10 and phosphate of .1. In my systems, I try to shoot for nitrate of 5-15 and phosphate of .05-.15. If your phosphate ever gets HIGHER than your nitrate, you will often end of with dinoflagellate and/or cyanobacteria problems. Low nitrate and high phosphate is where people end up sometimes when they use NoPox or vodka dosing, so that is why I stay away from the stuff.

Good luck!

Thanks for the help...I'm going to take your advice and ramp up the water changes as well as get some Rowaphos (instead of the NoPox)

I've finally tossed the API test kit, as it continued to show that my nitrates were zero.  My HR Hanna checker just tested them at 73.1 PPM!  Phosphates came back high as well 0.90 PPM (about 10x higher than desired, right?), so I'm wondering if NoPox is the best option to go with to get them both down.  I'm setting up a "mini-refugium" in the back of my RSM 250 (since I don't have a sump, I'm using the media rack to contain/grow some chaeto, but I'm a few weeks away from getting that up and running), so the NoPox wouldn't be a permanent solution, assuming that once the chaeto is growing nicely it will control the Nitrates by itself (not sure if it does anything to phosphates).  Any other thoughts/recommendations??  Thanks!

PM sent

1 hour ago, obrien.david.j said:

Me, I'd just mix up some bleach water (like 10:1 kind of ratio) - soak it overnight.   Rinse well, put it back the next day.    

10 parts water to 1 bleach?  That may be the way to go....I want to kill any chance of them surviving on the sponge

25 minutes ago, islandVib3s said:

Usually the boiled water will do the trick but I Usually fill a coffee cup up 3/4 rodi ,microwave. Then add peroxide. Sometimes i add lemon or lime,or aptasia x also to it.trick is to apply while it hot.most of the time in inject it

I'm not trying to inject them....I've had the sponge drying outside of the tank, so I want to kill off anything that might be left over (spores?) before putting it back in the tank

12 minutes ago, islandVib3s said:

I've microwaved rodi to boiling point,mixed in hydrogen peroxide and either dipped or injected while hot and have had good results. Sometimes they even pop lol

I didn't think to heat it up.....did you do a 50/50 water/peroxide mix?  Thanks again!

I had a bunch of aiptasia in the overflow area growing on a filter sponge, and I'm wondering what's the best way to kill them all off before putting it back in the tank.  My first thought is to soak in some hydrogen peroxide for a few hours, but if there's a better option, I'm all ears!   thanks

Do you have any pics of the 20 gal you were using as a refugium? 

Anyone have a simple refugium setup (5-10 gallons) they are looking to sell? 

16 minutes ago, Micah said:

Let's not flood my sale post with quarantine help. :). Feel free to hit me up in PM or in a thread post and I'll gladly chime in.  There are a couple other good resources on this forum as well.  

No worries...I tried a PM though and it said you can't receive messages....

23 hours ago, Micah said:

I'm not expecting people to have the same quarantine regimen, just that they love their fish the same as their dog and are sad when they die. You'd be surprised how many reef hobbyists only care about the money loss. 

 

If you're interested, let's talk. 

As I'm 30 days into my 76 days of fallow (velvet), I'm curious what your QT regime is?  I'm pretty sure I wasn't quarantining long enough (only 2 weeks), and I didn't have any therapeutic copper levels in the QT tank either.  I lost half of my fish, but did manage to save the other half.  Once they're back in the display tank and I start adding fish again, my plan is to increase the QT to 30 days and already have copper levels at least 2.0ppm.  What else would you recommend?  TIA!

yikes...my light setup is crap!  I just did some preliminary testes with a PAR meter and the best I got was about 155 at the closest to the lights in the middle of the tank....went all the way down to 35 by the sand bed......glad I'm swapping to the StevesLED upgrade tomorrow LOL

I have a Hanna Nitrate LR kit with 2 unopened boxes of reagents, as well as a Hanna Alkalinity tester with 1 unopened reagent.  Looking to trade for a Hanna Copper and Nitrate HR tester.  Located in Happy Valley

1 hour ago, Savo said:

How did you get the outbreak? Did you add more fish recently?

It wasn't too recent, but I added the 6 line wrasse a couple months ago (QT'ed it for 2 weeks, etc).  It and the dottyback didn't get along and I think it overstressed the dottyback to the point that his immune system crashed (he was the first to show signs of velvet).  He went from nothing to this overnight, and that's when we pulled all the fish and put them in QT.  I'm not sure what I could have done differently, as I pretreated the QT with copper prior to the initial 2 week quarantine.  I did have the carbon in the filter though, so maybe it pulled out enough of the copper that some of the velvet survived.  Or maybe I need to increase the initial quarantine to 30 days instead of 2 weeks?

We had a velvet outbreak right after the new year and we lost half our fish (mandarin goby, neon dottyback, bi-color blenny and a flame angel), but we managed to save the yellow tang, 6 line wrasse and 2 clowns.  They've been in a QT tank with copper since the 6th and seem to be doing fine.  I know I need to keep the display tank fallow for 72 days (so through 19 March), but I'm still a little clueless on how to manage the fish in the QT.  Do I still do water changes to deal with any ammonia?  If so, how do I keep the copper levels up to therapeutic levels - just continue to test/add copper as necessary?  I thought you only need them in copper for 30 days, so would I do a water change and not worry about adding copper after 30 days?  I know copper reduces their appetite, so I'm thinking it might be best to do a good water change after 30 days without adding copper, and let them settle down and see if it helps get them eating better again.  Thoughts!?  Thanks in advance for your help...this has been a rough one!

I've been having the same issue and picked up a CO2 scrubber that I plan on setting up to recirculate (waiting on one last part).  In the meantime, I've been adding Kalkwasser to my ATO and it's slowly been bringing up the Ph as well.  Started out going from 7.3-7.5 to 7.65-7.85.  Only concern is it's also been ticking the Alkalinity up along with it (from 8.5 to 9) - not too concerned about it yet, as long as it stays stable.  We'll see how it settles once the CO2 scrubber is up and running....

41 minutes ago, SuncrestReef said:

The Trident will never completely stop the DOS when the test results are out of range.  It only increases or decreases the dosing up to the percentage you specify, and when outside of the range, it will revert back to the base DOS amount without any adjustments.

You can automate turning off the DOS instead of doing it manually by adding a line of code into the Advanced tab from the DOS Schedule screen:

If Cax3 > 500 Then OFF

It will remain off until the next Trident test result is lower than this value.

Read Neptune’s guide for Trident Controlled Dosing here:

https://www.neptunesystems.com/getstarted/trident/tridentdos/

 

That's exactly what I needed....I added that code in for both Alkalinity and Calcium....many thanks!  (to be clear, I need to set them back to "auto" from "off" in order for the new code to be used, correct?) 

On 12/21/2021 at 12:20 AM, SpringFever said:

Calcium of 547? am I seeing that correctly? If so that's pretty darn high. That might be a bigger priority than low PH. I run 450 to match my salt and consider that on the high side. 

Yeah, I'm still figuring things out with this Trident and the doser.....for some reason it still doses 0.1 mL per hour, even if it's gone over the upper limit that I set (seems this is just how the unit works, my LFS said they just turn the doser off manually and let it settle before turning it back on).  I've started doing the same thing and it's now down to 513

9 minutes ago, Parzifal said:

That makes sense.  Glad to hear it,  I used to chase numbers,  I’d look at the other measurements before looking at equipment.
 

How’s the alkalinity and calcium?

For what it's worth, the Apex system have been keeping them about where I want them (The doser just keeps adding the min amount, even if the Trident says it's above my desired level of 8.5 (Alk, in this instance)), and even after calibration, the Trident seems to be lower than what Hanna is reporting - which is why I said "for what its worth" LOL.  Calcium is a bit high right now (I turn the doser off if it goes above 530), and same if the Alkalinity is above 8.5.