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.