high nutrient route

[marklugo23]

I just started a tank, elos 125, mixed with fish, 3 medium/LG, and 8 small. plan to go the *high nutrient route.... .5 phos/.5 nitrates. I have had some advise from a few readers who have success with high nutrients.....was wondering if anyone has had any failures....and any advice would help. I do 10% wc's every week.....and use a medium grade skimmer, and just started an algae scrubber mostly to localize algae (takes weeks to set growth). my levels are slowly climbing....and I plan to keep them at .5/.5. I use gen 4 wrx30s.

any advice from experience HN* reefers would be appreciated.

 

[reefer4eva]

For the longest time I struggled with colors on my sps corals and was mostly to blame for having low nutrients.i couldn't get my nitrates above zero.i currently have no live rock in my tank as my whole aquascape was made from alternative reefs that was made out of ceramic which is extremely porous and can utilize alot more bacteria than live rock so it would explain why my nitrates have always been undetectable.what I did was start by adding an additive from seachem called flourish nitrogen (which is basically nitrates in a bottle..lol)I did this slowly over a course of 6 months to get my nitrates up to 15ppm which is pretty high and I haven't had a problem as far as corals are concerned.if it gets any higher than what I have them at I turn my skimmer on and stop dosing the flourish nitrogen until my nitrates come down..my skimmer is a Nyos 120 that been working awesome!
Since setting up my tank I had never used gfo or carbon and I only do water changes once a month.

 

[jackson6745]

.5 po4 is very high and .5 no3 is not very high. Where did you get these target levels from?
For higher nutrient/deeper color SPS reef, I would suggest po4 <.1 and no3 10-25ppm. That will give you a better balance of color, health, and growth.

 

[Paul B]

All I can add is that my nitrates are 160 and my po4 is 2.0
I probably can't keep the real colorful, delicate corals.

 

[marklugo23]

I just always assumed high nutrient meant high phos/nitrates. my new target will be as Jackson advised. phos minimal <.1 and nitrates at 25. I just started to feed my tank live food and that resulted in my phos climbing fast!...also just got a fro and still waiting for my algae scrubber to kick in...i lost most of my Sps already..shohld have waited longer for stabilization. I forgot how sensitive sps are.

what do i guys use to keep the phos nearly 0 but nitrates 25...how do u find thst balance??

 

[Paul B]

I feed live food every day and have been for decades and my PO4 is very high