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Old 02-11-2013, 03:57 AM
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Delphinus Delphinus is offline
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How long have you had it and what species? I'm not familiar with the Radion programming but how long has it been on this particular "high growth" mode (it sounds like an extra bright setting?)

The only things that catch my attention about your parameters is that your calcium is a *little* high and that you don't mention alkalinity or magnesium, if you don't have those test kits yet, consider getting some soon. Here's why..

1) Calcium and alkalinity have a direct relationship with each other and I would say it's probably more important to track alkalinity than Calcium since it tends be more variable at first. I like to think of it this way - calcium is the bricks, but alkalinity is the mortar that binds the bricks together. Without mortar, you don't build anything substantial even if you have a really big pile of bricks (ie., high calcium). They need to be in balance with one another and a common sign of stress in corals can be that your Ca and Alk are out of balance. I target my tanks to be around 450 for Ca and 7-8 dKH for Alk.

2) Magnesium is one of those things that might not be immediately obvious as important to track, but it is useful to know where your Mag is at times for two reasons:
a) It helps keep your Ca in solution (with a low Mag level you can get Ca precipitating out easily which can coat your pump impellers magnets and so on).
b) I have no idea why this is, but I've noticed that anemones just tend to do better when Magnesium is at ocean levels. I used to be able to tell when my Magnesium was getting low when I saw my anemones not inflating as often as normal. There's definitely some kind of relationship here.

I target my Magnesium around 1450 or so. I just add enough Magnesium to my waterchange water and don't bother dosing.

You can think of Ca, Alk and Mg as "the big 3". When in balance, Ca and Alk will deplete at a rate proportional to one another and will need to be dosed at the same rates. Magnesium also depletes proportionally to these two but at something like 1/7th the rate.
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Last edited by Delphinus; 02-11-2013 at 03:59 AM.
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