Help me and my nitrates!

Allow me to repharase my initial post a little as it seems I was misunderstood.

What I meant by a nitrate factory was this....If you do not perform regular maintenance on the filter pads and feed heavily causing food and detritus to build up on the bio-balls, the balls can and will hold the nitrate causing elevated levels. When using a good amount of live rock as I mentioned earlier, with the sand, bio-balls are not necessary if all the above is done. I.E. not overfeeding, regular maintenance on filter pads, and minimum of 1lb per gallon of live rock.

I am by no means an expert on this, I simply post my experience with what I have learned personally and experimented with. I like to try new things and see what happens. I always have my fish and corals health at heart and have not lost a single fish...knock on wood. I have lost corals (3) to problems from the LFS water supply. It seems they were adding copper to the supposed fish only tanks. However, when I tested the water from the coral tanks, (out of curiosity) it had copper in it also. .2 to be exact. SO I blame the loss of those on the LFS. I fortunately did not have any problems in my own tank. I was worried that the copper would leach out and infect my tank. None to date thus far.

Anyway, back to the subject. Do what works for you. Many theories work with this hobby. Experiment and have fun with it and use what works for you.

Todd

 

Great. Just when I think I have a handle on some of this stuff...I really don't.
Thanks John for the info and clarification.

So basically, one uses wet/dry's for fish only more so because they produce more waste than a reef, thereby needing the additional area provided by bioballs. However, if overfed or underskimmed, then you get excess nitrate.

Which would still be the case if it were a fish only with liverock type of situation with no wet dry?

One more question, why does it seem like the nitrate reducing bacteria tend to lag behind the ammonia/nitrite reducing bacteria? With the first two steps, you get a spike and a drop.
With nitrate you get a spike, and hopefully a drop, but sometimes they begin to build up....ending up with high nitrate.

Not questioning the facts, I am just curious if anyone knows why that is? Why don't the other two seem to build up?

 

Sort of, just consider Bio balls as an extra, out of the way, surface area for bacteria, it's as simple as that. That's why the whole Nitrate Factory term is so wrong, using the same logic you could easily argue that live rock or live sand or even the glass that you tank is made of is a Nitrate Factory.

Well, this is my opinion

If you consider just a normal tank, sand bed, live rock, the surface areas that the aerobic bacteria can live upon are vastly more than the anaerobic bacteria. That plus the fact that the the water moves across those surfaces means that the aerobic bacteria is always being fed fresh 'food ( Ammonia and Nitrite ) however because the anaerobic bacteria is generally found inside rock and deep in the sand bed they cannot reach the same populations because they do not have such a large interface with their food source ( Nitrate ).

Hope that helps

John

 

Best thing to do w/cyanobacteria(RED ALGAE) is NOTHING,no water changes at all...This WILL die off within a month or so..Keep removing as much as you can by hand ...also most important thing,,,,NO TAP WATER!!!!!!!RO ONLY..This includes water changes w/ RO WATER & daily top off's w/ RO WATER...ONCE you see no more of red stuff,GO ahead & start doing water changes(W/RO WATER ONLY)I'd say pending on your tank size no mpore than 5% EVERY week 'till nitrates are 0 (zero)..............

 

When I had a cyno outbreak, I did just this too. I didn't do any water changes (it made the outbreak worse when I did). I cleaned off my bio-bale, cleaned out my canister filter of the gunk, and tried not to disturb the carpets of cyno. After 2-3 weeks, the cyno would start to lift off the rock, where I would just peel it away like a sheet of paper. Any part that would not come off easily, I would just leave it there and let it go through that same cycle. I would only supplement with some Kent "Essential Minerals", Strontium/Mylebdinum and liquid calcium to replace the used up nutrients that the fish used. After 2 months my cyno was completely gone and hasn't been back. *knock on wood* The last time I saw it was over a year ago, and I have been very religious about making sure my RO/DI system is on the up and up and not producing water with more than 30ppm on the TDS meter (before mixing with salt).