Okay, I haven't posted an update in a while. 2 months to be exact. Tank has been doing well. As you can see from my last post in January, I ran into high phosphate issue. I believe it increased over the period of time. Couple of things likely attributed to it:
1) I pulled out the refugium in late November due to macro algae breaking down. Did not add any other export method when I removed it
2) Detritus collecting in the overflow chamber.
The interesting thing though, the corals did not show any issues. At this high levels, I would have thought the acros would brown out. But didn't really see any issues.
In order to bring it down, did few large water changes, and used Brightwell Phosphate-E as a Phosphate export method on the tank. I know there are a ton of horror story with using Phosphate-E and other Lanthanum Chloride additives, and reef keepers losing live stock, crashing tanks etc. I knew what I was getting into and went slow.
Right now the Phosphate is between 0.1 and 0.08. As I was bring down the phosphate, had to keep a close eye on the Alkalinity and keep that balanced. Here is my test results since January 13th.
Phosphate-E is now part of the routine. Dosing 1 ml per day. As the coral colonies get large, I'm sure they will consume more nutrients at which point I can dial this down.
Talking about corals, here are some recent pictures of the tank.
The frags are encrusting and starting to grow.. still long way to get to colony sizes.
1) I pulled out the refugium in late November due to macro algae breaking down. Did not add any other export method when I removed it
2) Detritus collecting in the overflow chamber.
The interesting thing though, the corals did not show any issues. At this high levels, I would have thought the acros would brown out. But didn't really see any issues.
In order to bring it down, did few large water changes, and used Brightwell Phosphate-E as a Phosphate export method on the tank. I know there are a ton of horror story with using Phosphate-E and other Lanthanum Chloride additives, and reef keepers losing live stock, crashing tanks etc. I knew what I was getting into and went slow.
Right now the Phosphate is between 0.1 and 0.08. As I was bring down the phosphate, had to keep a close eye on the Alkalinity and keep that balanced. Here is my test results since January 13th.
Phosphate-E is now part of the routine. Dosing 1 ml per day. As the coral colonies get large, I'm sure they will consume more nutrients at which point I can dial this down.
Talking about corals, here are some recent pictures of the tank.
The frags are encrusting and starting to grow.. still long way to get to colony sizes.