Cali Kid Corals

Ryan’s 40G first reef

rdriggett said:
Nutrients are once again 0, 0 despite daily pellet and frozen overfeeding. Bummer. Alk dropped to 7.1 because I skipped a week of WCing. Cyano is getting much worse despite it being blown off nearly daily. Skimmer is working well and pulling out gunk. Hawkfish appeared to eat a frozen brine shrimp! Torch is seemingly fine.
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I know there's the "feed more" mantra, and that makes sense. However, now that you've stepped back from the "keep adding stuff" edge ;), maybe it's worth considering adding certain things. Particularly, you said you were doing reef roids, but have you tried adding some live phyto?

Live phyto in my experience has both phosphate and nitrates, and also has ... live phyto. The phyto being something that can compete for nutrients long term, and are coral food.

Neptune carries the smaller bottles of Reef Nutrition live phyto. Just make sure you triple check you grab the live one, not the dead concentrate. Also make sure to only add drops, not the whole bottle at once.
 
richiev said:
I know there's the "feed more" mantra, and that makes sense. However, now that you've stepped back from the "keep adding stuff" edge ;), maybe it's worth considering adding certain things. Particularly, you said you were doing reef roids, but have you tried adding some live phyto?

Live phyto in my experience has both phosphate and nitrates, and also has ... live phyto. The phyto being something that can compete for nutrients long term, and are coral food.

Neptune carries the smaller bottles of Reef Nutrition live phyto. Just make sure you triple check you grab the live one, not the dead concentrate. Also make sure to only add drops, not the whole bottle at once.
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I dose 10 drops of RN phytofeast daily.
 
richiev said:
Phytofeast Live or normal phytofeast? They have two different kinds, with almost the exact same design except for the word Live. The one without the word being the concentrated, dead, phyto.
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Bummer, its the dead phytofeast. I'll go grab the live one next time I'm at neptune/clearwater.

I've started dosing all for reef manually. I check alk, dose 20-30ML, then check alk again. That moves it about 0.3dKh. I bumped it from 7.3 to 7.7 last night and from 7.7 to 8.1 this morning. My new brute WC bin wont be here for a week and I gave away my other WC bin to a friend in need so my only choice is to dose for a week.
 
AFR takes a week or so to metabolize, so be careful with alk swings there. That one really takes patience to work. There was a bar thread on it a while ago where JVU killed a few colonies in an experiment with an established tank.
 
H2OPlayar said:
AFR takes a week or so to metabolize, so be careful with alk swings there. That one really takes patience to work. There was a bar thread on it a while ago where JVU killed a few colonies in an experiment with an established tank.
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I really don't want to kill anything! What do you mean by AFR takes a week to metabolize?
 
richiev said:
I know there's the "feed more" mantra, and that makes sense. However, now that you've stepped back from the "keep adding stuff" edge ;), maybe it's worth considering adding certain things. Particularly, you said you were doing reef roids, but have you tried adding some live phyto?

Live phyto in my experience has both phosphate and nitrates, and also has ... live phyto. The phyto being something that can compete for nutrients long term, and are coral food.

Neptune carries the smaller bottles of Reef Nutrition live phyto. Just make sure you triple check you grab the live one, not the dead concentrate. Also make sure to only add drops, not the whole bottle at once.
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There is no real amount phosphate or nutrients used by phytoplankton by adding live phyto to you tank. I wish it were true, I'd have used it in marketing RN while I was there.
 
BAYMAC said:
There is no real amount phosphate or nutrients used by phytoplankton by adding live phyto to you tank. I wish it were true, I'd have used it in marketing RN while I was there.
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Are you saying that because live phyto would get eaten/skimmed off, or the phyto would consume other nutrients than phosphate/nitrate to grow, or won't grow, or...?
 
rdriggett said:
I really don't want to kill anything! What do you mean by AFR takes a week to metabolize?
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AFR is a 1 part, different than 2 part. You can't mix 2 part into 1 part as it will participate into white sludge, so AFR has all the different chemicals bound in other forms that won't precipitate when together in a bottle. When added to your tank AFR gets broken apart and reassembled like Humpty Dumpty by your tank. You can look up the chemistry if that is your thing. That takes some time, meaning you need to wait for that happen to get accurate test results. Not sure how long that takes (Hours or Days).

Plenty of people are successful with AFR including 2 of my friends. JVU changed from one method to another, I think quickly from another post he was discussing it, so the method of change needs to be considered before discrediting AFR out right. Change is the enemy in any reef tank. So, if you want to go AFR, you should not have to worry, just don't flip flop between methods.
 
richiev said:
Are you saying that because live phyto would get eaten/skimmed off, or the phyto would consume other nutrients than phosphate/nitrate to grow, or won't grow, or...?
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I'm saying a reef tank is not hospitable for the growth of phytoplankton, there's not enough nutrients in your tank for these alga to do much, they'll get skimmed out, and you're never going to add enough biomass for them to accumulate much nutrients for you to see a difference. They also won't effect the pH in terms of keeping it higher.

That marketing got started by DT's phytoplankton and was picked up by the Scrubber companies who seemed to have run with it since.
 
Positive updates: hawkfish is pecking at frozen foods and is still alive so clearly he’s eating. Cyano is going away and skimmer is tuned well.

A9CDF76B-A121-47CC-A167-3E60C48F53B2.jpeg
 
It's wild how two days ago my tank was covered in cyano and now I have this weird grey green fuzz. Also I think my bryopsis is back. Damn it.
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rdriggett said:
Bummer, its the dead phytofeast. I'll go grab the live one next time I'm at neptune/clearwater.

I've started dosing all for reef manually. I check alk, dose 20-30ML, then check alk again. That moves it about 0.3dKh. I bumped it from 7.3 to 7.7 last night and from 7.7 to 8.1 this morning. My new brute WC bin wont be here for a week and I gave away my other WC bin to a friend in need so my only choice is to dose for a week.
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20-30ml of AFR sounds like a lot for your tank. Be very careful. I almost wipe out my tank overdosing on AFR because of the long delay you will see the impact on the parameters.
 
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