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So... I've done many dumb things to my tank over the years... but recently I broke all my records.
I've been dosing nitrates for 6 months now and it has been pretty cut and dry. A month ago I noticed that some corals were not looking great... it was odd. Others were thriving and some just weren't. I checked all my parameters and everything looked fine. So I chalked it up to new salt that I was trying out. A week later a few coral died and that's when I began to consider that my parameters were not correct and I sent a sample off to ATI for ICP testing... of course that takes 2 weeks... and other things were suffering in the meantime. I ordered new test kits and found out that my nitrate test kit was expired... and I didn't notice and it wasn't giving back correct readings. Here I was increasing my nitrate dosing when in fact I should've been doing the opposite...
So guess what my nitrates were at?
600 ppm. No joke. I'm honestly surprised everything didn't die.
The hard part there was getting the water back down. When I do water changes, water goes from my frag tank to my display and then from there it goes out so they were both at 600 ppm. It took basically doing 50% water changes over and over again to get it back to a reasonable level. That's a ton of water and salt!
So... if your nitrates are high there are some corals that will tip you off in advance. These include birdsnests, stylos, acans, cyphastreas, and duncans. These guys are a lot more nitrate sensitive than others. Even if you don't keep these kinds of corals, please consider doing so as they can tip you off early to a nitrate issue for sure.
Feel free to share and any lessons learned
I've been dosing nitrates for 6 months now and it has been pretty cut and dry. A month ago I noticed that some corals were not looking great... it was odd. Others were thriving and some just weren't. I checked all my parameters and everything looked fine. So I chalked it up to new salt that I was trying out. A week later a few coral died and that's when I began to consider that my parameters were not correct and I sent a sample off to ATI for ICP testing... of course that takes 2 weeks... and other things were suffering in the meantime. I ordered new test kits and found out that my nitrate test kit was expired... and I didn't notice and it wasn't giving back correct readings. Here I was increasing my nitrate dosing when in fact I should've been doing the opposite...
So guess what my nitrates were at?
600 ppm. No joke. I'm honestly surprised everything didn't die.
The hard part there was getting the water back down. When I do water changes, water goes from my frag tank to my display and then from there it goes out so they were both at 600 ppm. It took basically doing 50% water changes over and over again to get it back to a reasonable level. That's a ton of water and salt!
So... if your nitrates are high there are some corals that will tip you off in advance. These include birdsnests, stylos, acans, cyphastreas, and duncans. These guys are a lot more nitrate sensitive than others. Even if you don't keep these kinds of corals, please consider doing so as they can tip you off early to a nitrate issue for sure.
Feel free to share and any lessons learned