It’s incredible how much healthier my system is dosing phyto. My last system, I didn’t and had to clean the glass every other day. Now, it’s almost once a week if that. Live phyto goes straight into the rock work and has minimal clouding of the water. The expensive dead phyto, you need to shut your pumps and skimmer down for hours and is not nearly as beneficial. Best thing I’ve started doing so far. You literally can not add too much of this unless you have a nano. I have a 235 and would feel fine dumping a whole gallon in at once.
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Phyto dosing
- Thread starter ReeferMedic
- Start date
I am a huge fan of dosing live phyto and it's makes a HUGE difference in my tank and I cant praise the benefits or dosing it!
I used to have my skimmer shut off for 5-10 minutes after dosing phyto but I just stopped doing that since I dose it right after the skimmer section!
I used to have my skimmer shut off for 5-10 minutes after dosing phyto but I just stopped doing that since I dose it right after the skimmer section!
I usually shut the return pump and skimmer off for an hour or so just out of pure habit, but it isn’t even necessary with live phyto vs dead. I can’t stress the benefits enough and it takes about 20 a week to do. Such a huge benefit for such little time. I’m going to up it to 3 bottles soon, then 4.
I also usually try to do it when the lights are off and the LPs have their sweepers out.
I have it automated with dosing pumps three times a day and I think it's before lights go on, mid light cycle and right towards the end. I dose A LOT of phyto and actually use a pump to remove the same amount of tank water at the beginning of the sump so I don't have any long term issues with salinity creeping up.
You literally can’t use too much. If you change that second dose to the middle of the dark cycle, your LPs will all have their sweepers out. Just a thought.
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been making and dosing for 10 years wvery so often a little AB amino and then i grow brine shrimp eggs and stick them in there at night funny to see my corals grabbing them lol
I don't know if it was the pods or the phyto, but one of them spiked my po4 from dosing way too much everyday. I was almost certain it was the pods, so I bought sieves for straining them before dosing. I do love the idea of culturing your own CUC though.
You can have a mini algae bloom if you dose too much phyto and I doubt it was the pods. I dose pods every 1-3 days and a lot at that and my phosphates are right around 0.1 which is what I'm aiming for.
Yeah...I suspected it was the phyto as I was dosing a 200-400ml concoction of phyto and pods into my display tank, on a daily basis, for like three consecutive weeks before I got that super high po4 reading; I dialed it way back after that.
Trying to culture my own.
Attachments
Pods?
CUC, and probably pods as a natural benefit. I plan on swapping out small rocks as soon as my tank is cleared of algae. I’ll post my results in about a month.
Snails will reproduce like crazy in there if you keep them well-fed. My Tongan Nassarius snails have reproduced in my display tank; now, I have a few baby Tongans roaming around in there.
I have stomatellas that reproduce.i woke up to hundreds of them on the glass. Got and getting another wrasse to pick some of them off so they don’t overpopulate.
I like be keeping a reef without the “old school” clean up crews. I was always buying snails and crabs. I haven’t bought a single one in almost 3 months, and other than that CUC, it’s not growing much. I’m relying on tangs and these snails to control the algae. If I get crabs, they eat my snails. If I get hermits, the wrasse are going to pick them off. I’m not going the “old school” methods. I’m going to be trying to get my self to go BB in my QT tank. If a simple bowl of sand is good, thats fine. How would you go ab getting the sand out? I wou siphon it off into another container sorting through a 200 micron bag. I just want to be able to grab it at
Let me know how those snails do with GHA.
For taking out sand, I'd do it 1/4 of the sandbed at a time, so as to not stir up too much detritus, or release any toxins into the water column; And I would use this tool pictured here:
What’s it called so I can look on Amazon?
I got it at my LFS. It's one of those things you use to clean the sand in a reptile enclosure. Zoomed makes it.
If you dose too much and it's not consumed before it dies it could lead to higher nutrients.
I have snails laying eggs all the time. I have also found that a sudden temper change helps trigger snails laying eggs. I haven't done it on purpose but when my heaters have had issues and temp drops I notice strings of snail eggs everywhere. It's happened a few times when the Hydros battery backup system failed to kick back on so the heaters stayed off over night.
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