Help with Nitrates

Oh dear, your tank shouldnt be reading any amm or nitrites. If you do a water change you only going to remove the bacteria that you need to convert them.
You could try an airstone to help remove them - but the nitrates are different.
Unless you have a form of denitrafication you'll never be rid of them, but you prob dont have anything that is nitrate sensitive

 

I posted the other day on one of these No3 threads the tank is stuck in a cycle and all the water changing will just keep it in an biological uproar . Cut the lights off and set back and let settle in for a bit, Its never totally cycled as of yet.

 

Brings up a point then. I do a 30% water change every two weeks. Too much? The fish and corals seem happy.....

 

Being in the area that I live in, tap is really my only choice. RO/DI or any combination thereof is not available, and from what I understand about them, an RO/DI unit would just be too expensive to operate here as well.
And I seem to be a bit confused here, as almost every answer is dealing to the cycle. Am I to understand I completely lost the cycle due to the anemone death?

 

I'm not certain about 'too much' but I 30% every two weeks is certainly more than you need to do, assuming that you have good biologic filtration.

I assume that tap water is more expensive in the desert than it is here on the coast but it would still be worth your while to get an RO/DI unit. Set up a barrel to collect the rejected water and use this for irrigation, washing dishes, or some other purpose. Another option would be to get a Kold Sterile unit which is a form of DI that has very little rejection.

 

Tap is currently VERY expensive There is no way I can leave the water running half a day to get the required amount of water. It is VERY expensive here, especially in the summer, as drinking water has to be bought from California by Nevada and piped all the way over. The nearest location that sells RO/DI is ~125 miles (actually across the state line). I live in a apartment, so storage and "other" uses for the waste water is impractical. It would actually be more cost affective to drive my SUBURBAN across stateline to buy RO/DI.
It sucks :-/

 

Yeah, I could probably back off on my water changes now. I did those primarily because of my skimmer (a POS Jebo). Now I have a better skimmer, so I'll back off to small weekly water changes and one large monthly.

 

So have you ever tested your tap water for ammonia/nitrites/nitrates/phosphates, etc?

 

It testes 0 for ammonia/nitrites, and some risidual for nitrates (just a little darker than zero in the test tube, but not nearly as dark as the next step up). I havent checked it for phosphates.