Thoughts on over skimming

[sphelps]

Originally Posted by mr.wilson

I haven't tried vitamin C dosing, other than a bit in the food for lateral line disease, but this thread is pretty thorough. http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1602494

I'm surprised your nitrate and phosphate is zero and your calcium is 400 and alk 8, considering you have so many stony corals and you don't use carbon, phosphate remover, algae or coral harvesting, much in the way of a sand bed, ozone or UV sterilization. You also seem to have modest feeding practices (no phyto, baby brine, or rotifers). Usually coraline algae is a probiotic way of outcompeting nuisance algae, but you have stated that you discourage its growth.

Your old tank looked like it had the works, and the new one is pretty minimalist. What do you attribute your success to?

Thanks for the link.

I could try different test kits, mine are fairly old (Salifert Nitrate and Elos Phosphate) but they're not expired so I assume they're accurate. I'm always wondering what my clams are doing for me, perhaps I should look more into it.

Yeah my old tank went through about every kind of equipment available and it did get overly complicated in the end even when I tried to simplify things. I contribute my success to stability more than anything and just sticking to the basics. I believe most of what I was doing in the past was not necessarily needed and the goal with my new tank is determine the bare basics and keep things as simple as they need to be. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them in my build thread, the tank is still a work in progress.