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Thread: Nitrate limitation.

  1. #21
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    I feed a ton of blended oysters, 6 ml a day, so chances are all of the p is being consumed by the algae and tge coral and thats why i get a 0 reading, right.

  2. #22
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    I think I have to mostly agree with Ace here. I have never tested zero P on the tank I run a scrubber on. Just Saturday, one day after cleaning the scrubber, it tested trace N (0.2) and P = 0.06 which is actually very low for this tank. By day 3 or 4, N will be hard zero and P will stay or rise.

    What Ace is saying here is that if you add more food which contains N and P at the Redfield Ratio, you do not alter the skewed amount of P in the tank and cause it to drop unless you add more N than P by supplementing the tank with additional non-food N (to balance the ratio). Without doing so, if you have a de-nitrification mechanism in the tank (anaerobic pockets in LR), albeit a small amount, it can be relatively effective given enough porous and established LR. Effective enough that in a closed system (no PWCs) that N will be consumed without P being consumed, thus skewing the ratio and causing nitrate limitation.

    Unless I am misunderstanding something about denitrifying bacteria, which would throw this out the window and leave me completely amiss as to why I can have zero N and my P seems to never be zero. Actually, right after I moved the entire contents of the tank, it did bottom out at 0.01 any maybe 0 for one test, then it started to rise again. My thought on this (again, test results that support a theory) is that once the anaerobic zones were re-established after taking rock out of and back into water twice during the move, the denitrifying bacteria got a foothold again after a month and started to pull only N out of the water, skewing the ratio in the system.

  3. #23

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    Is there any way of reducing P i hate to run GFO but if i have to i will.

  4. #24
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    theoretically, dosing Nitrate. I have some Calcium Nitrate from here http://www.aquariumfertilizer.com/in...ditU=2&Regit=3 but never used it. I was too chicken. Or just didn't have the time, I don't remember.

  5. #25

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    Yeah i dont know if i would be brave enough either :-)

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