High nitrate

Hi there, can anyone give some good advice in lowering my nitrate in my tank. its reading 80 for about 3 week and all others amonia 0, ph 8.4 and nitrite is 0.

 

How much do you feed and how often? Do you use RO/DI water or tap water? My guess would be you are over feeding, but we are going to need to know your tank, size, livestock, do you do water changes?

 

55g with 50lbs of lv and 55lbs of ls, when i got that high reading i clean the sandbed only 15gallons and i started feeding them once a day, i have a blonde naso tang, yellow tang and a marroon clown. i had a puffer that ate one of my red snail but i didnt get that half eating snail and i believe that got my nitrate high, i got the puffer out of my tank last Sat. I am wondering if i should be doing yet another sandbed cleaning this weekend and how often can i do it not to mess up the tank.

 

Stop cleaning the sand. It's probably releasing all kinds of nasty stuff into your water. water changes, water changes, water changes. "The solution to the pollution is dilution"...I really don't know who said that first, but it makes sense. also, set up a fuge if you don't have one and add some chaeto to it. Or you could make a nitrate reducer thingie...

 

how often should i be doing these water changes...weekly??? would the water changes clean my sandbed...it looks dirty in some places

 

yes weekly about 15 gal. You have messy fish, and a med/small tank, so you need to do it more often. what kind of circulation do you have? Koralia's/Tunze? How many and what size are they?

 

I had 100 ppm nitrates 2-3 weeks ago. did a 50% water change, cleaned all my filters, rinsed my bio-balls in saltwater and added 2 bags of de-nitrate in sump. my nitrates went from 100, to 50, 20, 10, 5 and now 0. over the course of 2 weeks..

hope that helps. clean your filters twice a week.

 

I fear that yours was a temporary fix though. Get rid of the bio balls and make that part into a chaeto holder and stick a light over it on a reverse (daylight)timer. I do agree about cleaning the filters. They and the balls will breed nitrates. Also, watch your feedings and do the w.c.'s. de-nitrate is a temporary fix. 3-4 mos. then the nitrates come right back unless you get something in your fuge that eats it. Mangroves are good too.

 

I'd recommend not stiring up your sandbed for a while and let stuff settle. You can get little critters to clean it for you (bristleworms come to mind but there are some commercially available animals too). I don't know if you've mentioned it (I didn't see it) about the R/O unit, you have a med sized tank and messy eatters that could be contributing. However you could just be adding the nitrates from your water supply if your not using R/O.

Nutrient export is one of the keys for removing nitrates, if you increase your water changes then the export will lower them. You could consider using some macro algae into your sump (didn't see if you had one) if need be (chaeto seems to be the new standard), or perhaps increase nutrient export (algae or water changes) by some other means (I like the ATS myself).

 

my guess would be the fact that there are 2 tangs in this tank. Tangs are poop machines which is just one more reason that they need to be in larger systems with adequate filtration.