Nitrates

[lickyricky]

NO matter what I do, I just cannot seem to get my nitrates down below 30 ppm which I know is horrible. Does anyone have any recommendations, its a 29 gallon biocube with bioballs. Do you think I should dose it with something? if so, what?
I have in the tank, 2 green chromis, 1 regular clown, 5 corals, 20 snails, and a serpent star

 

[Steven R]

i suggest taking out the bio-balls they produce nitrate like a beast, follow with a solid water change, How often are you doing a change of at least 10% ?. second do you have the HQI bio cube or no? if you do have the HQI there is a compartment in the back that is for a macro algae i suggest placing some chaeto in there on a light cycle this will help you a lot with the nitrates. you will always have nitrates in the system unless you are running a reactor or a large refugium at least half the size of the tank to be effective, Dosing will not help at all with nitrates water changes and chaeto will though, good luck

 

[ritter6788]

i suggest taking out the bio-balls they produce nitrate like a beast, follow with a solid water change, How often are you doing a change of at least 10% ?. second do you have the HQI bio cube or no? if you do have the HQI there is a compartment in the back that is for a macro algae i suggest placing some chaeto in there on a light cycle this will help you a lot with the nitrates. you will always have nitrates in the system unless you are running a reactor or a large refugium at least half the size of the tank to be effective, Dosing will not help at all with nitrates water changes and chaeto will though, good luck

+1 to this. Get those bioballs out of there. Are you running a skimmer?

 

[Pappy]

Big wc and def +2 on bio balls.

 

[lickyricky]

I change 5 gallons of water once per week. I am running the small skimmer that came with the tank but I may not have it set up correctly

 

[Pappy]

I would try 10 gallon wc(30%) every 2-3 days and check in between.

 

[Steven R]

I change 5 gallons of water once per week. I am running the small skimmer that came with the tank but I may not have it set up correctly

The air driven skimmer that comes with it is almost useless unless you clean the wooden air block almost every other day I would upgrade to a Tunze 9002 skimmer that is what I did on my Bio-cube and I added a refugium in the cabinet. I also would do a three gallon change instead of a 5 on a 29g you run the risk of crashing more with bigger changes in a small tank I learned the hard way twice with mine reason being is the more water you change out on a smaller system the more your ALK and Ph will swing and could cause it to crash and your salt no matter how close you get it to match will swing also. How do you make your water and what type of salt do you use?

 

[Steven R]

also how old is the tank? reason I ask is that the bacteria responsible for removing Nitrate dont show up till about 6 months unless you added stability which I would do I did on my three systems and it sped up the process a lot.

 

[3Twinklets]

Im with Steven, Ritter and Pappy. I hate bio balls! Change your water and cut down on your feeding.

 

[robert]

Bio-balls do not produce nitrate - this is an old myth.
All they do is provide surface area on which the bacteria that ultimately convert ammonia through to nitrate can live.
Because bio-balls do not have pores, they do not harbor the anaerobic bacteria which consume the nitrate and liberate N2 gas.
The key to running bio-balls is to not let them accumulate or trap detritus and then they are fine.

Having said this, if you have sufficient surface area in the aerobic areas of the tank (rock, sand. glass) - then you probably don't need the additional nitrification area provided by the bio-balls and may be better off running a highly porous media in their place. Something like seachem de-nitrate. Just as with bio-balls, you don't want to let detritus accumulate around the de-nitrate either, but with their deep pores, the de-nitrate will harbor the anaerobic bacteria necessary the break down the built up nitrate.

Depending on load, this may be enough to allow you to control nitrates with routine water changes. Nitrates in the 5-10 range are fine for most corals.

 

[Steven R]

Bio-balls do not produce nitrate - this is an old myth.
All they do is provide surface area on which the bacteria that ultimately convert ammonia through to nitrate can live.
Because bio-balls do not have pores, they do not harbor the anaerobic bacteria which consume the nitrate and liberate N2 gas.
The key to running bio-balls is to not let them accumulate or trap detritus and then they are fine.

Having said this, if you have sufficient surface area in the aerobic areas of the tank (rock, sand. glass) - then you probably don't need the additional nitrification area provided by the bio-balls and may be better off running a highly porous media in their place. Something like seachem de-nitrate. Just as with bio-balls, you don't want to let detritus accumulate around the de-nitrate either, but with their deep pores, the de-nitrate will harbor the anaerobic bacteria necessary the break down the built up nitrate.

Depending on load, this may be enough to allow you to control nitrates with routine water changes. Nitrates in the 5-10 range are fine for most corals.

The reason bio balls create nitrate is because the detritus will gather on the inside and out if not cleaned a lot, this is where I get they produce nitrate's and I know they do since after I removed mine from my system my nitrate level has dropped a ton and with my fuge, and regular changer I now have almost no trates and fought this battle for almost half a year till I found out the bio-balls are more of a problem then good kind of like a wet dry trickle filter they both require more work then the work they put in for the system IMO

 

[Cooper32803]

If he takes out the bioballs, shouldnt he take a fraction out each week? Not sure but that is what my LFS told me to do when I had them in my tank and going through my cycle. Something about it would cause a mini cycle if you took them all out at once. Maybe someone can chime in about that...

 

[robert]

If he takes out the bioballs, shouldnt he take a fraction out each week? Not sure but that is what my LFS told me to do when I had them in my tank and going through my cycle. Something about it would cause a mini cycle if you took them all out at once. Maybe someone can chime in about that...

That right - the bio-balls may be making a significant contribution in the reduction of ammonia to nitrate - taking them out all at once could conceivably reduce the nitrification capacity enough to result in an ammonia spike.

Steven, the purpose of bio-balls is only to provide a substrate for the bacteria responsible for nitrification. 100% of the nitrate in the tank comes from the food added to the system. All tanks to which "Y" amounts of food are added will produce "X" amounts of nitrates - it doesn't matter in the least if the bacteria that accomplish this live on bio-balls or the glass sides of the tank. Any accumulation of "undigested" food anywhere will provide a reserve of potential nitrate - it doesn't matter if its in the sand or in the bio-ball chamber.

Unless you didn't pre-filter the water going over the bio-balls, I think your success in controlling your nitrates has more to do with improved export, than it does with removing the bio-balls. The addition of a fuge and regular water changes would have had the same effect with or without bio-balls. As I said above, the key to running bio-balls is to not let them accumulate or trap detritus. I still run bio-balls on my larger frag system as I keep no rock or substrate at all in that system for reasons of pest control. All water is filtered and skimmed before it flows over the bio-balls and I have no problems.

 

[Steven R]

I see your point you are right about pre-filter, touche

 

[3Twinklets]

Bio-balls do not produce nitrate - this is an old myth.
All they do is provide surface area on which the bacteria that ultimately convert ammonia through to nitrate can live.
Because bio-balls do not have pores, they do not harbor the anaerobic bacteria which consume the nitrate and liberate N2 gas.
The key to running bio-balls is to not let them accumulate or trap detritus and then they are fine.

Having said this, if you have sufficient surface area in the aerobic areas of the tank (rock, sand. glass) - then you probably don't need the additional nitrification area provided by the bio-balls and may be better off running a highly porous media in their place. Something like seachem de-nitrate. Just as with bio-balls, you don't want to let detritus accumulate around the de-nitrate either, but with their deep pores, the de-nitrate will harbor the anaerobic bacteria necessary the break down the built up nitrate.

Depending on load, this may be enough to allow you to control nitrates with routine water changes. Nitrates in the 5-10 range are fine for most corals.

Well said Robert Thank You.

 

[reefman88]

robert- You beat me to it. 100% right about the whole bioball thing. My friend had a 225g SPS tank with nothing but a wet/dry, skimmer, and calcium reactor. Bio-balls get a bad rep, when really its just they require a good pre filter sock/pad. And of course you also need live rock to complete the process.