FarmerTy's 215 build

[FarmerTy]

That's exactly what I told Ol Aggie a couple of weeks ago but I'm interested to see if it can be accomplished now. I don't have any utter chaos but I'll put up a frag of my naso tang that says I can get my phosphates below 0.05 ppm with biopellets!

[victoly]

You'd biblically split your naso tang! You monster! I think that with your fish load and reasonable feeding, you're gonna be struggling to keep your phosphate low without chemical intervention.

Of course, an algae outbreak will keep it low too, i mean an algae free tank with low phosphate

[FarmerTy]

I'll split my tang in the name of science! I call heads! Okay, excuse the slightly morbid humor.

I've always depended on chemical intervention for ultra low phosphate levels that my SPS like. And my feeding is anything but reasonable... which is why I have the nitrate issue I have... among other things. The interesting thing about my tank dynamics is if I leave the refugium going, even if I have so much nutrients that algae goes nuts in my tank, the only thing that will happen is my macro algae will go very quickly in the sump and anything growing in the main DT will get consumed by either my tangs or my urchins.

Interesting thing to note is that I have resumed feeding my ridiculous amounts of food per day and with the GFO reactor being offline for almost a week and me dosing phosphate, my phosphate levels continued to drop after each time I dosed phosphate. I know this won't carry on forever but I was surprised at the results. I purposely added roughly 0.16ppm of phosphate to my system over 3-4 days and continued to feed heavily while removing my only phosphate removing system (GFO) and my phosphate still went down! I started with 0.02 ppm, dosed 0.16ppm of phosphate over 3-4 days, removed my GFO during that time, fed like crazy, and my phophate went back down to 0.05ppm... not to mention my nitrates went down from ~50ppm down to ~10ppm over that time.

I don't know what kind of voodoo that is but whatever it is... I like it!

[victoly]

do you attribute the drop after dosing due to you "getting in the zone" that your macro liked? (0.16 ppm - 0.5 ppm = 0.11 ppm) = 0.11 mg/l in 946 liters of water (~250 total system gallons) = 104 mg processed in 3-4 days or ~30 mg/day, which lines up pretty nicely with a RHF article:

"For those interested in knowing how much phosphorus is being exported by macroalgae, this free pdf article in the journal Marine Biology has some important information. It gives the phosphorus and nitrogen content for 9 different species of macroalgae, including many that reefkeepers maintain. For example, Caulerpa racemosacollected off Hawaii contains about 0.08 % by dry weight phosphorus and 5.6% nitrogen. If one were to harvest 10 grams (dry weight) of this macroalgae from a tank, it would be the equivalent of removing 24 mg of phosphate. That amount is the equivalent of reducing the phosphate concentration from 0.2 ppm to 0.1 ppm in a 67 gallon tank. All of the other species tested gave similar results (plus or minus a factor of 2). Interestingly, using nitrogen data in the same paper, it would also be equivalent to reducing the nitrate content by 2.5 grams, or 10 ppm in that same tank."

Granted you weren't harvesting per se, but still neat that you were able to reproduce findings. I think the hitch here comes when you want to get down below 0.05 and you can't get your macro to thrive because the PO4 is too low, which leads to increase in PO4. It kind of self limits when you get into the ULN range. GFO don't care about no stinking redfield

[FarmerTy]

Yes, I would assume it was more the macro algae uptake than bacterial uptake and me getting "in the zone" for the macro. If my biopellet reactor was running, I would assume more bacterial uptake but that is just a wild guess as I don't know if bacteria would assimilate it faster than macro algae.

I appreciate the calculation you did on the amount of phosphate processed and its comparison to the RHF article. I perused the article last week and found it results interesting but did not correlate the results I had back to it. Very interesting indeed and I'll give it the official cool rock out smiley face that my impromptu experiment somewhat lined up with it... even though my controls were non-existent and my process severely limited by equipment and lackadaisical documentation. I guess not bad for spontaneously putting it together.

Please send my consulting bill to El Jefe, MFrame.

I will agree with you on the hitch. I feel that the macro will be too limited to make a difference at the ppb levels I am wanting my phosphate level at and I didn't even think about the failing macro actually contributing back to the phosphate level increase. Perhaps that is when the bacterial uptake will be able to take it down to the ppb's for phosphate and I should just remove the macro if it shows itself to be withering away in the low phosphate environment. One can only hope but you don't work so long in the field and not carry out your day with a giant weight of skepticism on your back daily. As Gig'em wisely said, that's my job is to be skeptical!

[victoly]

Your job is to be skeptical until you run out of money. Then you better have a delivrable ready or

[FarmerTy]

What if I fired myself long ago? Haha. The word deliverable still gives me goosebumps.

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[FarmerTy]

Must be something in the water! Details posted later tonight... dare I say... a video!

[victoly]

Tease.

[FarmerTy]

Enjoy the late night viewing. Make sure the spouse isn't watching you or they'll question what video you are watching.

For those who don't want to hear the awesome song in its in entirety, you can fast forward to 0:25 and 2:00 and see the good stuff.

[Wardlaw]

i wanna buy some of these from you whenever the population allows it

[+brian.srock]

Awesome vid Ty.

[FarmerTy]

Thanks Brian! Glen, I have a million of these guys. More often than not, when people buy frags, there are a couple wrapped around the plug.

Once my colors come back after all that experimenting, I'll have a frag sale and anybody who buys anything can have some if they want as a gift with purchase. :-)

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[+olaggie01]

Had that happen a while back in my tank as well. Didn't mouth siphon anything for a while after that.

[+brian.srock]

LOL

[Planeden]

Had that happen a while back in my tank as well. Didn't mouth siphon anything for a while after that.

i know a guy who did and he got these really bad headaches. then a strange bump started growing under his eye. then one night...

[Makena95GT]

Im pretty sure it was you who gave me my first frag and it had two or three just chillin on it lol

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[FarmerTy]

That's what they like to do... wrap around my frag plugs and chill out.

[Bpb]

I also went from having zero mini brittle stars to having a healthy population all over the rocks thanks to Ty frags I've purchased. Bonus!!

[FarmerTy]

Hey wait, I was supposed to charge you for those!

[FarmerTy]

Caught my mandarins spawning again. Looks like about 40-60 eggs were released but that's a wild visual guesstimate. The chromis made short work of it though.

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[FarmerTy]

Been a little busy the last couple of weeks and haven't gotten to experiment anymore on the tank until recently. At the expense of some of my corals, and perhaps my copperband (RIP little guy), I was still going back and forth with experiments using macro, biopellets, and even vodka to manipulate nitrate and phosphate concentrations in my tank. To recall, the last thing I did was add potassium phosphate to my tank to increase the phosphate level in my tank so that there was enough readily usable phosphate for the bacteria in the tank to consume it along with the excess nitrates in my system (>50ppm).

Well, I left it alone and my nitrates slowly drifted back up again after reducing it down to <10 ppm (let's give some latitude to the accuracy of the readings as I am using a simple API test for nitrates) and went all the way back up to 40-50ppm. This is with reduced feedings and I have been skimming wetter. I had already stopped using GFO during this entire timeframe as well and the phosphate level creeped back up to 0.10 ppm, when it usually is in the 0.04-0.05 ppm range.

So what's a guy to do with 50ppm of nitrates and 0.1 ppm of phosphates? Invite carbon to the party! I dosed an absurd amount of carbon in the form of vodka. Again, I must state, please don't do any of this as I am just experimenting with my limits of tolerances. I want to know the furthest I can push it so that in the future, when I need it, I can know how far I can push it. I just don't want to be blamed if someone decides to pour a whole bottle of vodka in their system!

So, I added roughly 20mls/day of vodka in my system, left the lights off (main reasoning for this is cyano is a big fan of carbon as well and when you remove the carbon limited environment, the bacteria will take off but so will the cyano... the key difference is cyano needs light... bacteria don't... so leaving the light off allows only the bacteria to make use of the carbon without having to compete with the cyano), and ran my skimmer wet.

Results after two days was interesting. My phosphate went from 0.1ppm to 0.02ppm and my nitrates went from >50ppm down to ~10ppm. Now, to give scale, that's removing ~40ppm of nitrates and ~0.08 ppm of phosphates in roughly 250 gallons of volume! That's roughly 37.9 grams of nitrate removed in 2 days by bacterial consumption! Converted, that's 0.086 lbs of nitrates! I'm sure I must have miscalculated that so someone check me... or I'll check myself later when I have time!

Anyways, part of the reason most caution to overdose vodka is because it will cause a bacterial snow storm as the bacteria will quickly multiply, cause the water to get cloudy, and use up readily available oxygen, and possibly suffocate your fish and kill them. This was averted with having a giant skimmer (they are not just for removing dissolved proteins, but aerate the water as well) and very high water surface/air ratio in the system. My water was cloudy and my skimmer went nuts. The bacterial bloom engulfed the nitrates and the phosphates in my system, as well as carbon and oxygen, and then got pulled out by my overrated skimmer (rated for 550 gals and being used on a 250 gal total volume).

Anyways, fun experiment, some corals paid the cost via STN because I left the nitrate levels so high and let the phosphate levels creep up as well during the experiment. All in the name of science!

-Ty

[+KimP]

Another interesting write up Ty! Do you think any damage was done from lowering the nitrate and phosphate so fast? Are you going to continue some form of carbon dosing to keep levels low? What about your biopellets, are you using those?

[FarmerTy]

Thanks Kim! I like to share the results in case anybody finds it interesting as it is fascinating to me.

I have restarted my biopellets (solid form carbon dosing) about 1.5 weeks ago and while waiting for it you ramp up, I have been conducting the experiments.

I'm sure there is some repercussion of removing it too fast but the SPS that are already weak didn't show more signs of stress. Hard to tell though, kind of like looking at a really beat up car and trying to notice if someone added another dent to it.

My mainstay was biopellets as it held my nitrates in check in my last system and gave me such an awesome SPS dominant tank while having a large bioload as well.

I'll have to start over a bit with my SPS colonies in this tank but I welcome the challenge and the fun that comes with growing colonies from little frags.

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[Sascha D.]

Very interesting Ty. I know a fair bit about vodka dosing. Did you consider vinegar dosing as an alternative? From what I understand it is more forgivable but vodka is more economical. It's sort of ironic that you just got your prized pieces back and then had this happen. You didn't hurt my stylo did you?