Reef nutrition

My 170g cube

Grow dammit.
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I'm guilty of putting forth minimum effort and hoping for the best. Needless to say, it's not working.

I've been doing a lot of work cleaning up the stuff I've been ignoring for the last few months. With this tank and my little arms, that includes dunking my face in the water to reach the back center of the tank but I've cleaned up 90% of the detritus piles under the rock work.

Stirring this stuff up has brought my phosphates through the roof, currently up to 0.64ppm. I'm running gfo but it's pissing my clam off big time (I'm sure the detritus and phosphate spike isn't helping). I ordered some of the brightwell phosphate remover, I have a spare channel on my dosing pump so I can accurately control how quickly it pulls phosphates out.

The fuge is running strong with the new light and my nitrates haven't jumped past 10 with all this mess. My softball chunk of chaeto and culpera has doubled in size. The tank is 18 months old now, it's time to really take care of it and keep it stable.

I am impressed with how effective a pair of 8 year old mp40 pumps do on the back panel but I need a little more flow, especially behind the rocks. I'd love to get another pair of mp40 but that's money I'm not going to have for a while.
 
OK, I'm stupid.

I've been irritated by high phosphate readings lately.

I have been feeding the fish once every other day, changing filter socks every day, 50g water changes twice a week and tossing half a gallon of chaeto every week with no affect. I've been getting between 0.64 and 1.36 on every test. Yesterday I started dosing Brightwell Aquatics Phosphate - E and based on my calculations from last night's doses (via dosing pump) I should have dropped down to at least a 0.34 reading on the red sea phosphate pro (high range) kit. This mornings test showed 0.64.... I pull the RO water for my tests from my 10g ATO tank under the stand.

High range test with ATO tank water, 0.64

High range test with RO water right out of the filter, 0.17 (lowest reading on that test).

Low range test (just tank water) 0.01!
Repeated this test 3 times with identical results.

The ATO tank is the culprit. It's under the stand, next to the sump with dosin containers in front of it and an acrylic lid covering most of it and a reactor on top of the lid. Pulled everything out to find rotting cat food in the bottom of the ATO tank.

I feel really stupid.
 
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