melev

Wow... nice Marc! My son's tank is far from what I would consider "mature" ( at nearly six months old) and he is still seeing some blips in nitrates and phosphates. If you were to attribute your amazing success to one or two practices in this regard, what would it be? Fuge... treatments... water changes... ???
Jim

I have a large water volume, I've not filled the tank up with a ton of fish, and I don't feed massive amounts. I do put food in two or three times a day, but smaller portions.

I think the NP pellets are doing that magic currently. That's my hope anyway. I run the skimmer, have a healthy refugium that I cull macro out of every few weeks, and that's about it. The tank has been up 3.5 months and I've only done 250g total in water changes.

Hi Marc,

Few questions on chemistry;

What is a normal ph swing in your tanks history in a 24 hour period? What type of swing is a concern in 24hr period, i.e 8.3 in day 7.9 at night? Is that a concern?

When you say, up the output of reactor, what does that mean? Effluent ph lower, ie. 69 to 67 and more drips on output?
Does that upping of output, also change Ca and Mg theoretically?

Here's a graph from the past 7 days for pH:



Regarding the calcium reactor, the output was barely dripping out, so the tank wasn't getting quite enough alkalinity. By upping the output to a steady trickle, it will bring that number up. The goal is to find the matching flow rate. The reactor's pH controller is set to 7.4, with a bubble rate of 1 bubble per second.

This media must have some magnesium as well since my level stays solid and doesn't seem to need replenishing.

Appreciate it. I'm currently making some changes to my fish room and refuge is off line, hence, no light cycle at night. Imagine if you did not have opposite lighting per fuge, your ph could swing even more. I've been running a Calcium Reactor for years and never really "dialed it in". I'm getting the picture and think my confusion was I thought I absolutely had to have the effluent ph in 65 - 68 range? I had super high Ca over 480. I now see that I can play with the PH on effluent like you have and testing to fine tune. Thanks for the feedback.

In the past with different media, I've run pH as low as 6.2 running 3 bubbles per second. The effluent flowed out non-stop in a steady stream, and this kept up with a full-blown reef. Starting a new system with twigs is a whole other ballgame.