Rob,
Very nice to hear from someone who has started using pellets in an already running/established tank!! How long was the cyano bloom? How many nitrates did you have? How fast did the decrease? Do you still have detectable nitrates? And my favourite question(like I haven't asked enough lol) what changes did you notice in the corals, like sps, zoos, Lps, chalice, etc??
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OK...
Cyano bloom lasted about 5-6 months covered everything but I stuck with it and didn't take it offline.
When I first converted this system to be a reef after moving the tank and letting it run with only rock and substrate for a couple months nitrates were unmeasurably high. 100% water change dropped it to around 100ppm where it remained I could change 50% of the water and within 2 days it was back at 100ppm with virtually no bioload. Vodka/vinegar dosed at extraordinarily high levels, lost some corals, nitrates dropped to around 50ppm and plateaued. BTW this whole process took around 3 years. And yes I had acros living growing (very slowly) and nicely coloured at 100ppm nitrates. There was no significant build up of phosphates in the rock as I had long ago learned to control algae in a fish system by controlling phosphates.
Stayed at 50ppm'ish for a year would not budge...tried biocubes but not enough to make any real difference, finally brought pellets on-line since they were much cheaper for a large system than bio-cubes. The rate of decrease was somewhat controllable by controlling available phosphate by how much GFO I ran. Once the culture really got rocking I had to take GFO offline as I had 0 on Hanna ultra low range and my monti's all lost their colour and my chalice all bleached out and Z&P started dying back. Honestly, I almost took the pellet reactor off-line a couple of times but talking to DarrylV convinced me to stick with it and it was the right choice. Pellets have been online for a year I think
BTW in a year my system has consumed almost 1500ml of vertex pellets but now that the levels are low they have virtually stopped disappearing.
Nitrates are currently under 5ppm and I don't have to do water changes to maintain that, where I was changing 30-40% weekly when it was stuck at 50ppm and still getting nowhere. I have dialed it back on purpose at this point since I don't want it dropping too low. It will be slow adjustment from this point to find a level that has everything reasonably happy.
As for corals, and I will very much stress that this is my experience with my system...Your mileage may vary....since there are too many changes and uncontrolled variables for this to be in any way scientific...
Most sensitive to high nitrates...Acan lords and open brains (Wellso's etc) never opened, never grew, died quickly or slowly at 50ppm nitrates. numerous attempts. Now happy and growing quickly even rough TLC pieces. Next Monti's that just survived (or not) in the high nitrates, now growing rapidly. Example, when I got the tricolour and Blue devil from Ben I got a piece of red digi at the same time. Tricolour didn't miss a beat, blue devil browned but encrusted where I mounted it, digi was dead in about two weeks and this was not the only digi failure at 50ppm. Monti's are also quick to react when phosphates are stripped too low...lose PE then lose colour...they like nitrates low but like a little phos in their diet. Z&P don't seem to care much about higher or lower nitrates but growth is also best when Phos isn't stripped too low.
Acros, growth has accelerated but is not as dense as nitrates have dropped. Some brown ones have coloured up but there were many that looked great at 100ppm so no hard rule much more specimen specific than the sweeping statements that the online world is full of...yes everything has good colours with the lower nutrients (except the reds in the fire and ice Prostrata which was amazing before and hasn't yet adapted to the new conditions) but plenty looked great with higher levels.
If it was your goal, you could by trial and error fill a tank with beautiful acros growing slowly but happily at 50-100ppm nitrates and fill your sump with the skeletons of the frags that didn't adapt and then tell the world that nitrates don't affect coral colours or mortality at all....and have pictures to "prove" it.
Chalice is a very mixed bag...I lost some of my faves that had been happy in the high nutrient soup but a couple that had been slowly dying are doing well in the new conditions including a TLC piece that I got from Jerry that I honestly didn't think was going to work out but it has coloured up and has a nice green growth edge all around.
I guess it is fair to say that all of the change was hard on many things and so there were gains and losses out of the process. My hope is that the good params let me keep whatever I want rather than whatever will adapt to less than ideal conditions.
...of course the increased growth along with the decreased volume of water changes threw my alk dosing way out of whack, which kicked the crap out of some of my acros, but if this game wasn't challenging it wouldn't be worth playing. Oh and my SSC survived all of this and has held its colours throughout. Who knows...
