high nitrates

My boyfriend and I set up our first saltwater tank in November of 2010. We got some fish over the next few months. For Valentine's day he got me a Koal Tang. It was fine for a month, then got white spots (we thought Ich). Then our Scooter blenny died followed by our two clown fish. Our Shrimp, hermit crab, starfish and snails are all fine. Now we can not get our Nitrates down. It has sat with no fish in the tank for about a month and a half now. We are still at 40ppm Nitrates. How do we lower...

 

Welcome to 3reef,

Are you preforming routine water changes?

 

Water changes.

 

We have done one water change. We are using tap water mixed with Prime. We fill a 30G tank and let it sit 2-3 days before the water change. We are also curious how to get reverse osmosis water. The research we have done says that would help. Is there something we can buy at our LFS? I was hoping something to put in the water or poor tap water thru a filter? We would perfer not to go thru Culligan.

 

Some LFS do offer RO/DI and mixed. You can get RO/DI bottled at most stores as well.

In some cases tap water is acceptable but that is usually not the case even if you do add conditioners. You are by far better off using RO/DI only for top off and water changes.

I would do a couple more water changes, personally I like smaller more frequent ones compared to larger less frequent water changes.

Nitrates of 40 are not too bad and they should come down with water changes, especially if you have no fish currently.

Welcome to 3reef.

What type of filtration are you running on the tank? Skimmer? Carbon?

 

We use carbon filters.

 

how large is the tank? i could be overstocking?