Bo0ger1, show me your tank...

I started reading those long posts but have to confess I got distracted
and spent an hour or so peering into my reef instead: that sort of
thing seems to happen a lot. Skipping down to the references I note
that some of them are 25-30-35 years old! Reefkeeping has changed a lot
from that time of the old "coral graveyard", I think the needs of
modern reef tanks are quite different and maybe you can't use the same
agruments anymore.

If you have high NO3 (or PO4) then you need water changes, completely
agree with that. Originally mine were up in the 40-50ppm, I solved this
by:-

1) starting to grow Cheato in the sump
2) changing my feeding regiem
3) adding a DI pod to my RO system.

On point (3), I discovered that my RO water had about 7ppm of NO3 in
it, top-up & water changes were actually contributing to high NO3! DI
pod fixed that.

As an aside, I'm amazed that one of the articals above advocates using
tap water rather than RO for top up & water changes, a sure-fire recipe
for high NO3, I think. Although I'm guessing that most of you are on
the other side ofthe pond (I'm a Brit.), maybe you have better water
quality than me!.