- Hi, guys and girls, I'm ReefMan,
and I wanted to talk to you about getting nitrates
and phosphates down to zero in your tank.
So, I'm sure all of you have came home one day
and there's some algae...
Algae. We'll say it right this time.
There's some algae growing in the corner of the tank.
You know you're not so worried about it
and then a month later your whole tank is green.
So you do some water tests, you find that phosphate is high
and you run on to the forums and you find all the ways
to reduce phosphate and you start some GFO,
and you do some water changes, and add some roaphos,
these kinds of things.
Maybe you dose vodka or something like that,
you get really, really into it.
And y'know, eventually your algae
goes down and you're back to normal.
But then you'll find that, okay your phosphates are zero now
on your ultra low range parts per billion hana checker.
But your coral is drab and not colorful.
And now you have some stringy bubbly stuff growing,
And you do some research and find out
that those are dinoflagellates.
Which is horrible and makes you worry
about the future of your tank.
I would like to suggest that you're not really serving
your own best interests by hitting zero on phosphate.
And same with nitrate actually, you need some phosphate
and some nitrate in your tank
and I think a healthy ratio to reach
is something called the Redford ratio.
There is a scientist that did a whole bunch of studies
all around the world and did a comparative analysis
and found that in ocean water and
in phytoplankton in ocean water,
the ratio of carbon to nitrogen to phosphorus
is about 117 parts carbon
to fourteen parts nitrogen
to one part phosphorus.
So.
if you...
wanted to...
shoot for a target in your tank
about fourteen to one
nitrate to phosphate
would be the ratio that I would suggest shooting for.
You don't have to actually target that.
But.
Note that in the wild,
the oceans do have some of these chemicals in it
and coral and every living thing in your tank
needs some phosphate and some nitrate to really do its best.
Now most people are just feeding their fish normal food,
frozen food, maybe mysis cubes, flake food, pellets.
Whatever you're feeding is probably the major contributor
of both nitrates and phosphates to your tank.
So, if you're feeding something like mysis,
something that is collected from the wild,
krill, anything like that.
It automatically has the ratios correct
for nitrate and phosphate.
So, you could probably just stop dosing vodka
or get rid of that GFO or whatever it was you were using
to get down to zero phosphates now that your algae is gone.
And just up your food intake just ever so slightly
to increase those levels in your tank.
Your coral will immediately look better, I promise you.
In my tank I have had a strawberry shortcake acropora for
I dunno, a couple years now.
It's kind of growing very slowly, encrusted over the rock
and always been kind of drab.
Since I have started dosing a little bit of nitrate
from my pax bellum algae reactor,
I've noticed that my strawberry shortcake acropora
is really colorful all of the sudden.
Over the past month it has went from
just above this beige-ish...
vaguely green...
lump of coral to a really pretty green and pink
strawberry shortcake acropora.
And I've also noticed, so what I did was
increase my nitrate by one part per million in my tank.
And I have been measuring my phosphate all along
and after increasing the nitrate by one part per million
that has unlocked whole bunch of new processes in my tank
that have actually reduced my phosphate
lower than vodka ever did.
Because when I was just dosing vodka,
and I had to stop dosing vodka.
But when I was dosing vodka,
my whole tank it turns out was nitrate limited.
And now matter how much vodka I put in there,
nothing would grow to use the phosphate
because there was no nitrate.
So by increasing the available nitrate in my tank,
by just one part per million,
I've unlocked a whole world of bacterial and algae processes
that are now happening in my tank.
All my corals look a lot better now.
And my phosphate has actually been reduced by about 25%
It was at 0.1 parts per million,
now it's at 0.7 parts per million.
Like I said I don't want it to be at zero,
so my goal is just not to get it to zero.
But I do want to keep a basic amount of nitrate
and phosphate in my system available for my acroporas,
for my pax bellum algae reactor,
and for all of the other things that need to grow
in our tank to make a healthy ecosystem.
So my pax bellum reactor came with a nitrate
and molybdenum dosing solution.
That's going to run out shortly I'm sure
and I don't plan on buying more of that.
I plan on buying either potassium nitrate
or sodium nitrate, mixing up a solution,
and then using a dosing pump to dose it every day.
I just want to keep about two or three
parts per million nitrate available in my tank.
For my algae reactor to use, for my acroporas to use,
for anything that needs it to happen.
And it will also keep my corals much more colorful
than a 0:0 system.
I would recommend keeping your levels around
maybe around five parts per million nitrate.
And then about 300 parts per billion phosphate
would be the sort of ideal Redford ratio
for a reef system.
So that's it, I wanted to give you a recap of
why you might wanna dose nitrate,
why you might want to overfeed your corals
just a little bit to have available nitrate,
and why you shouldn't target zero nitrates,
zero phosphates in your reef tank.
Hopefully it was interesting,
let me know what your experience with nitrates has been.
There are people that run crazy stuff like sulfur reactors
and all sorts of things to get rid of nitrates.
Certainly you can have too much of it but
I'm curious what you thought.
So yeah, till next time. Seeya, bye.