Up to date thinking on phospate remover and running carbon with scrubber...

[steve]

Sorry, I know this has been discussed before. Background to me seeking up to date clarification: my scrubber was working well and I was down to levels of 5-10ppm nitrate. This has risen over the past 6 weeks and I'm now at 25ppm. I replaced lights as these were at 3 months old but I've not seen any reduction in nitrates in 4 weeks.

I'll post separately but I've now doubled my light and increased flow slightly to try and get green growth I've never had. So whilst I'm doing this refining I wanted to ask

1) Whether using phosphate remover to the extent of having a reading of 0.0 and very little hair lage would actually prevent the scrubber from doing its job properly (as there is no phosphate)

2) The effect on the scrubber of using activated carboon 24/7 as I've always done this.

[Floyd R Turbo]

1) this may affect growth, I would only run phosphate remover periodically to maintain 0.00 P if you are having an issue doing so, otherwise, there is a need for Phosphate throughout a marine system by many organisms, and completely removing it out of the water column IMO is not natural. You want very low, but present.

2) should have little to no affect on scrubber growth, but if you have lots of corals, it is still removing the good and the bad. I would consider also running carbon only periodically, like a couple hours/day or one day/week. IMO no need to run continuously, unless you fear a chemical war between corals.

[steve]

Thanks for the advice Floyd. It sort of goes against everything I've learned about the phos remover, but at least if I do switch off I can measure the affects, unlike removing carbon which is much more difficult to tell the affects.

Problem is I'm panicking to get nitrates under control as I know for the corals at least this isn't sustainable. Going aginst this is I have a copeerband who won't feed, so I'm chucking in more/different food to try and entice him!

[Floyd R Turbo]

I have heard both in the past and more recently that levels of nitrate in the 10-20ppm range are not really all that bad, and many corals will tolerate this level (some prefer it) and even up to 100ppm in some cases.

Also from what little I know, the copperband will only eat aiptasia.