Live session - Nitates and phosphates

Hi.

Past weeks i have spent some hours listening to the podcasts in the truck, love them all so far. Time flies on the roads when doing this.

In one of the live sessions (can't remember whitch one), someone called in with high phosphate issues.
He had high phosphates but could not get them down.
If i rember correctly he also had undetctable nitrates with his test kit.
I was surprised that no one mentioned that, phosphates and nitrates are linked together in some strange way. The bacteria just cant "eat" phosphates if no nitrates are present, and vice versa. That however is fairly easy to fix with some kind of phosban. Or a tiny addition of nitrates.

And if it's the other way around.
I had undetectable phosphates and high nitrates, and just couldn't figure out why. After trying practically every biological way, vodka additions, zeovit method, aso... Still high nitrates. I really didn't wat to use sulphur filters and such. I came across a post in our swedish forum (http://www.saltvattensguiden.se), that stated this very clear.
So i stopped rinsing my frozen food, as most of you know some are known to have some levels of phosphates. And just like magic the nitrates droppes from 50ish down to 5 in two weeks, another week or so both phosphates and nitrates are undetectable. Once the levels were down i started to rinse the frozen food again, an i have not had any issues with that since.

Just a tip on how i battled this.

yeah your talking about the P:N ratio findings.

where a greater ratio of NO3 will reduce PO4, yet greater PO4 wont reflect a higher uptake of NO3.

I cant remember specifics though, however I do recall O2 atoms played a huge role.

You have a resource link for me to check out - other than in the Swedish language..lol

Exactly.

Here is an article i came across, but it is from 1998. I'm sure newer studies have been done.
http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/Bot482/...Mar%20Biol.pdf

I just try to keep both of them as close to 0 as possible.

So do I.
But the bacteria needs both so it can be processed by the bacteria.
I wanted to point out, if the other one is high and the other is very low it can't be processed properly.

In combination with a carbonsource (ZEOstart, vodka...), this problem can get even greater as one of either N or P goes down to 0, that was my issue.
As soon as i made sure that i had a slight addition of P, the N started to go down... fast. And i batteled with high nitrates for a looong time, all this time my P test did show 0.
I did also use VSV mix for months with no effect.