High Nitrates

[Jeana]

What are you using to test?

If it is that high and you want it lower, good nutrients reduction advise as stated above utilizing your refugium effectively will probably be all is necessary.

For nitrate I have the API test kit

 

[sawdonkey]

I need HELP! I have very high nitrates in my 45gal with 10gal sump. I literally have ONE fish, a octo 50 skimmer, a fuge with macro, and have been doseing vodka to take care of nitrites. What is causing them to rise? I do a 10% water change every week and the tank is a little older then a month old. I have a few lps. Do I need a CUC? I know I will, but figured with one fish I would be ok without one for a while.

You could have all kinds of things going on. Your tank is new. I assume you’re all the way through your cycle? Clean up crew won’t do much for you. Is your skimmer producing a disgusting dark brown skimmate? How much are you feeding that one fish? I’d probably lay off the vodka (and also stop dosing it in your tank). Let your tank stabilize for a while and reassess to see if you or your tank needs vodka.

In the meantime, I’d suggest bigger water changes...like two 15-20 gallon changes in one week. Remember, the nitrifying bacteria lives in surfaces, not in the water, so by doing water changes, you get rid of the nitrate, but your (good) bacteria stays. The solution to pollution is dilution (and figuring out what your nitrate source is....probably fish food or dead stuff on your live rock?).

 

[SPR1968]

I think if your only doing water changes very 1.5 months, the simple answer to reduce your nitrates is to do more frequent water changes.

Just be careful with how much you change though because you don’t want to change to much and risk upsetting the water chemistry, and probably no more than around 20%. 10% is the normal recommendation but this of course depends on personal commitments etc and I do around 18% every month these days.

Another option if water changes are difficult to keep up, is to look into carbon dosing, for example Red Seas Nopox, which I’ve used for a few years and is excellent at Nitrate reduction

This will keep your nitrate under control and could also be used along with additional bio media such as Seachem Matrix, marine Pure etc to get all the tanks bacteria working for you.

And welcome to R2R as well!