Recent content by CharlesJohns58

I will preface this by saying I have not played around with adding ammonium in any form, my system is a bit large to tinker with like that. However, I would suggest dosing in the morning after the lights go on as photosynthesis will be ramping up then and hence I would imagine along with an...

My point is you don't need nitrate per se, you need nitrogen and the ammonium form serves this purpose better than the nitrate form in my opinion.

Why do you add nitrate? I presume you are doing so in order to provide nitrogen correct? Then why not add an ammonium compound instead e.g. ammonium chloride or ammonium bicarbonate? Coral prefers to use nitrogen in the form of ammonium since it is much easier to absorb for them as the energy...

I would not recommend lowering your PO4 too low without also lowering your NO3. Otherwise you risk significantly increasing the difference between them and hence increasing your N/P ratio. What are your current NO3 and PO4 levels? Soft corals supposedly do not care about N/P ratios, but stonies do.

Thanks everyone for coming out Sunday evening. It was great to meet some new faces and see the old ones as always!

Cuprisorb will remove many metals not just copper, so expect lower values across the board for things like Zn and Co. It may work on your Tin as well. https://www.faunamarin.de/en/knowledge-base/copper/

That copper level is fine, that is 0.008 ppm, nothing to worry about. What additives, if any, do you use? Tin is high, which is odd. I would run another FM ICP to verify these numbers. Never use just one test as a basis to make changes.

This is our current LC dosing rate on the big reef. This gives us a level of 0.5-0.7 ppm PO4. We add ours into a sand filter inlet to remove the precipitate. We are adding 275 mL diluted into 30 gallons of DI water of which we currently are dosing approx. 3 gallons/24 hrs. So basically 27 mL...

You know it doesn't really matter, you are still talking about the same elements here, N and P, its just the units are different, FM uses a massic ratio, I am using a molar ratio. It's somewhat similar to NO3-N vs NO3. The first tells you the amount of just N, the second is basically the N plus...

Yes that is correct. As Claude has said none of this is scientific so we are both basing our recommendation on our experience with our systems, and in his case, his experiences with 1000s of ICP testing on systems. In my case, I am also looking at what has been published in the scientific...

The P that they are measuring is all the phosphorous in the system via ICP. It does not distinguish whether these are from organic or inorganic. The Total Phosphate number is just simply converting the P number to PO4. So ideally they should label that total phosphorous (TP) not just P. The...

So do corals ... better pull them! ;)

Or the ICP test is wrong. ;-)

A coarse filter pad will not do it. You need something much finer. Maybe I am missing something, but is there a particular reason why folks are wanting to use LC instead of GFO on these smaller hobbyist systems?

There is some confusion in their instructions which could lead to some problems if you don't read everything on their site on how to use it. At first they say you can use it to quickly lower phosphate, which is the last thing you want to do in a reef tank, but later on down the page if you open...