Quote:
Originally Posted by BigJohnny
Anyone have experience with this?
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Sorry I've been AWOL, all my elderly relatives are deciding to climb up ladders and fall into the rhubarb.
Using dirty method, dosing nitrates to ~5ppm, phos is .03. Feeding a rotation of frozen mysis, emerald entree, heavy doses of phytofeast, ROE, NLS teeny pellets and oyster eggs. No water changes. Running minimal carbon, mechanical filtration at night. No skimming or water changes. I think my tank may be turning a corner.. I have had a couple of snail deaths which is worrying, but the other inverts are ok. Having a lot of cyano in the one corner where a crab and shrimp molt wound up but otherwise I see a whole lot of green algae, diatoms (weirdly). Still seeing at least 2 genera of dinos under the microscope but I can't scrape enough off the glass/filter socks to get Sommus' test to work.
@bigjohnny I have a load of corals from my bro in law's tank which exploded near the beginning of the month. Includes 2 palm sized Monti caps and 3-4 unknowns. The fuzzy sticks actually look really happy, with good PE. They are very brown, but the bleaching from the shock of being dropped onto the floor is actually reversing. I also have crap lights compared with bil. 2 monti caps, seem ok but one has a white margin I'm not sure about.
@bheron the carbon is more to soak up toxins. I run it since I have toxic Ostreopsis and have had a lot of deaths. Skimmer did nothing for me but some people have had good results. Dinos suck up *insane* amounts of nitrates and phosphates. I have had to actually dose nitrates to maintain a reading.
@billybatz Glad to hear you're getting somewhere! I would try to gently suck the cyano up with a turkey baster. Water changes don't do much for cyano (imho) because it can fix its own nitrogen anyway.
@karimwassif I think dirty vs clean is where one is on the ocd scale.
Some people are driven insane by algae patches and want tight control of what goes on in the tank. People like me are kinda lazy, like the idea of random critters and aren't going for a TOTM aquarium. There's probably a correlation between having sps and getting dinos; I just got "lucky".
ivy