SURF4 Journey

[tasso]

Well I purchased the Surf4 back in Mid January so its been running for a couple of months now. It took a good month to start getting some decent growth but now I am really starting to see growth accelerate. I am attaching a pic of what I pulled out of it yesterday. My question is, when will I start seeing reduction in nitrates? Currently my tank is sitting between 30-40 ppm and my phospate is good at 0.05.

[SantaMonica]

Nice to hear.

Depends on how many nutrients are in the rock, and how many other filters you have, and least important, how many gallons there are.

[tasso]

Don't know about the nutrients but I do run a skimmer, GFO and sulfur denitrator. The tank is 240g with a 80g sump.

[SantaMonica]

How much rock, and what was the state of the rocks for the last year or two.

[tasso]

85% of my rock is 10 years old (18 months in my system) and the rest of it is about 2 years old. The "newer" rock is BRS puckani rock which leached phosphate heavily but most of that leaching is now gone. I did used to have hair algae on those rocks but none anymore, whatever was left of it my tangs ate it. Most of my tank is algae free execpt for a little green slime algae on the sand and a bit on one rock and some on the return PVC.

[SantaMonica]

How much are you feeding, and what about water changes?

[tasso]

Have an autofeeder that feeds 3 pinches 3 times a day and I also manually feed live worms and 1 1/2 cubes of frozen food daily. I usually do a 60 gallon water change about every 3-4 weeks.

[SantaMonica]

As a guess, each handful of growth you harvest is probably a few ppm of nitrate.

[tasso]

So in order to reduce nitrate, harvesting must out-compete nitrate production correct? Will that even be possible?

[SantaMonica]

Yes that's the case with every tank. Otherwise it builds up.