I had been meaning to do a thread on my attempt to deal with "OTS" through carbon dosing so I might as well continue here...
History:
Where my 180gal glass box that I set up a little while ago is fairly new, most of the rock and substrate in it have been in my tank(s) for well over 15 years. Most of that time the tanks were "old school" tank, canister filter, live rock and Macros in the display
PERIOD No sump, no skimmer, no reactors. Way back when I was last really involved with the hobby "skimmers good or bad" was a topic of much argument...and Bill was paying for his ?gunmetal grey? Porsche selling the latest, greatest DAS systems. Shockingly
success with inverts was very limited...
Anyway...As Darryl has mentioned in other threads, old pieces of live rock eventually become nitrate sinks...no hurricanes or tsunamis in our tanks to really shake them up and clean them out periodically...
As such, my new tank, that had sat running for several months with no live stock other than things that were growing on the rocks and virtually no feeding still had nitrates @ 90-100ppm when I was ready to start stocking it.
Changed almost all of the water and carried on with getting things going tank was OK but not meeting my expectations Nitrates were hanging around 10ppm growth was sluggish at best some frags just died fairly quickly. Tried some phosphate remover which helped a lot, and dosing vodka to eliminate that last bit of nitrate.
Needed a new test kit so I looked through my box of stuff and found an ancient one but when I went to empty the bottles and toss them I realized that part two (API) was a much newer one that much have gotten switched when the cat tipped over the shelf in the basement...(yes unusually sloppy on my part)
Went out...got a new Salifert kit and found 10ppm was really 100ppm...(strangely only a bit of Cyano no other algae) No problem, very little livestock and therefore little feeding, change 40 gal twice a week for a bit, problem solved....instead no improvement.
Tried the "massive water change"...shutdown the pumps, lower the rock a bit, removed and replaced over 100gal and any detritus i could find in a single water change cut the 'trates to just below 50ppm..by the end of the week they were back at 100ppm with virtually nothing going into the tank and red dragon macro growing like mad although chaeto shrinking.
My Euroreef skimmer was fine for the stocking level but way too small for the system volume and not up to my plan to try pushing carbon dosing to whatever level it would take to try to drain the nitrate bank...Got Bill's demo in250 (way underrated IMO looking at air volume and reactor sizing) and started to push...
When I inquired in Tee's thread about his dosing I missed that he was talking vinegar not vodka so at that point, with the multiplier plus the vinegar I add to my Kalk top off water I was already over 300ml/day vinegar or equivalent with no visible effect. In fact there was no evidence that I was dosing at all until I reached over 650ml/day (with Kalk buffering the ph).
The second day at that level, I noticed a few white strands growing on the return nozzles when I left for work, when I came home that night I saw this...
The skimmer pulled 4 liters of medium brown viscous goop that smelled like a not so subtle blend of sewage and vomit over the next 24hrs and the tank was clear. The only immediate casualty was the birdsnest...
surprisingly it seems to be recovering now.
Cut the dosing in half as recommended but as nitrates had not budged from 100ppm i started to increase the dose and almost immediately got a bloom although much less extreme. Cut back again to 250ml/day and held it there to see if the now established culture would exhaust the nitrate supply in the rocks. After three weeks with the skimmer pulling 2 liters of dark horrid muck every day the nitrates dropped suddenly to 50ppm for a few days bounced back to 90ish and then began a steady decline to current 40ppm.
During that time period the livestock have had widely varied reactions...
Zoas bright extended and multiplying...
Green Palys cycle umbrella then open and multiplying...
Brain receding...now melting...
Favias full and bright see the rim of bacteria strings...
Duncan and War coral? happy...
Flame BTA split and almost black...
Clam...Happy as a...
I will update pics as this continues...This experience was not anything that the info on the net prepared me for....
Incidentally when the nitrates dropped below 50ppm the chaeto took off growing and the DT has virtually every kind of green algae (mostly pest) sprouting out of nowhere but not unmanageable at this point I just have to clean the glass finally.(phosphates still undetectable)
