Post cycle Nitrate removal

[bdejong1112o]

In preparation of the completion of my tanks cycle I have been looking at options to remove the copious amounts of nitrates that will be present.

I used all dry, dead rock with wet/live sand in my 220g tank. I amonia dosed using amonium chloride. I also used bacteria in a bottle to get it all started. It has been a few weeks and it recently brought amonia down to near zero. I did a second dose of amonium chloride to test the ability to remove the amonia.

But, while all that is going on I am working on the next step which would be dealing with the leftover nitrates.

I know that a large water change is one option and I can do that if necessary but I am also interested in other options to strip out the nitrates without wasting 40-60 gallons or more of good water and salt...

Any good media bag options that I can run in my mini reactor or in the sump to pull out the nitrates?

Should I just add the chaeto to my fuge and let it eat it?

Any other options that are viable?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

There's no media that binds nitrate. The choices are water changes or biological consumption of some sort.

 

[WWIII]

Yeah the only "quick fix" for nitrates is water changes, but with a 220 gallon tank that's tough. I had the same problem with my 200 gallon tank and dosing ammonia more than once to "test the cycle". I couldn't get my nitrates below 40ppm, even doing water changes. There's just so much volume that it makes it difficult. Eventually I started dosing vinegar, very slowly following the methods @Randy Holmes-Farley describes in his articles. This was about 8 months into the tank when I started dosing vinegar and it took another 6 months to get them down to 2ppm. Then I slowly weened my tank back off thr vinegar for another several months. Now I dose nothing for nitrates and just do 20% water change biweekly. My nitrates stay at 2ppm-3ppm. It was very frustrating for the longest time, it just takes patience!

Edit - Chaeto may work, depends on how high your nitrates are. You probably need quite a bit of it for a tank that size and then need to make sure it grows and then remove some of it every so often by pruning to remove the nitrates. Carbon dosing and water changes seem to be the answer for high level nitrates, then once they are under control some other methods are more practical.

 

[beaslbob]

Should I just add the chaeto to my fuge and let it eat it?

yes

Any other options that are viable?

Not as viable is balancing out the tank with chaeto or other algae.

 

[WWIII]

yes


Not as viable is balancing out the tank with chaeto or other algae.

Hard to tell what his tank "balance" is since in normal circumstances we don't pour straight ammonia in our tanks.

What is your nitrate level now @bdejong1112o ?

 

[teller]

I was writing my opinion but it is already answered.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

You said:
"
Yeah the only "quick fix" for nitrates is water changes
"
You are totally wrong!
Macro algae can put your nitrates at 0!
I don't recommend 0 but you definitely can control your nitrate levels.

I'm not going to debate whether growing chaeto is a "quick fix", but if the nitrate is from dosing ammonia for cycling and if there is no phosphate in the system, chaeto may not be a good choice.

 

[Rick Krejci]

I'm along the same path as you (2 months in), although with a much smaller tank (60 gal). Used the reefsaver rock, ammonia dose and cycle accelerator bacteria. I kept Chaeto in the fuge with a Kessil H380 and the stuff grew like mad. My issue was that, starting sterile, my phosphates were non-existant, even with a heavy stock of fish and moderately heavy feeding. I started getting a little dark smelly slime on things, especially the fuge (possibly dinos) and no green algae on anything, although the chaeto has kept growing (about a softball a week). Nitrates held steady at about 20, phosphates 0.00-0.01. PH was 100% tied to the fuge light cycle (increased when on at night, decreased during the day when off) indicating little photosynthetic activity in the day. With 12-13 hour fuge light, I could see the increase in PH tail off towards the end of the cycle, indicating to me that perhaps nutrients (probably phosphate) were becoming limited.

I've since turned the fuge light period down to 6 hours (from 12), reduced my Chaeto ball size, and have dosed some phosphate to get readings of 0.05. The slime has decreased significantly and display still looks good. Nitrates are down to 10 and slowly decreasing, presumably reduced due to the better nutrient balance. Daytime PH is starting to stabilize a little.

I've decided not to dose vinegar/vodka at this point, just letting the Chaeto do it's thing. Not any reason other than it being more tangible to me than bacteria fed with Carbon. I'm perfectly fine with the 10 nitrates and 0.05 Phosphates, so I'm just aiming for stability rather than hitting 0 levels for the nutrients.

 

[penguin_free]

Is nitrite testing 0 already?

 

[Brew12]

How "high" are your nitrates?

Nitrates are generally not harmful to anything. Unless you have an algae or bacteria issue in your DT I'm not sure you need to do anything about it.

 

[bdejong1112o]

Wow, was not expecting so much activity so fast. Thanks to everyone for taking the time to contribute. I will try to answer all the questions but first a little more information that may help.
Just to be clear, I am looking in the future to plan my next steps. I still have a few weeks to go on completing the cycle I am just a nut for planning ahead..

• The tank is 220g 72" wide.
• My sump is a dual tank configuration with the intended purpose of running Triton in the future.
  • I have a 29g tank that the water drains into that is 100% allocated to a refugium.
  • It currently has nothing in it, water just flows into the second sump tank right now.
  • I have a Kessil H380 for when the Chaeto is added. That light is not running of course.
  • The second tank is a 40G which has the skimmer and then return pump and a 14g ATO tank.

I will retest once I get home from work tonight and post current readings.

Hard to tell what his tank "balance" is since in normal circumstances we don't pour straight ammonia in our tanks.
What is your nitrate level now @bdejong1112o ?

I am using a Red Sea test kit and the Nitrates are over or equal to 50 which is the highest reading on the red sea kit.

I'm not going to debate whether growing chaeto is a "quick fix", but if the nitrate is from dosing ammonia for cycling and if there is no phosphate in the system, chaeto may not be a good choice.

I am dosing Ammonium Chloride. I dosed to 3-4ppm for the initial dose a few weeks ago. The ammonia cycle did start and brought it down to as close to zero as I could discern on the red sea test kit. I then did a 2ppm test dose two days ago to see if it could bring it down within 24 hours. I will test for phosphates tonight and see if any are present.

Is nitrite testing 0 already?

Nope, It is bright red on the red sea test kit. I was paying more attention to ammonia. Now here is where i may have gone wrong. There are some debates on if you wait until both Nitrites and Ammonia are at zero before test doing ammonia or if your pay attention to only ammonia and test does when it is at zero. I made a decision to only use the ammonia reading as my signal to test dose. I will test again tonight as ammonia has dropped again.

How "high" are your nitrates?
Nitrates are generally not harmful to anything. Unless you have an algae or bacteria issue in your DT I'm not sure you need to do anything about it.

I am using the Red Sea test kit and it is at or above 50 which is the highest range.
I do not have any alge growing anywhere yet. I want to keep it that way especially in the DT. There is nothing growing in the sump tanks either and no signs of anything starting to grow. I am watching for that very closely.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

I am using the Red Sea test kit and it is at or above 50 which is the highest range.
I do not have any alge growing anywhere yet. I want to keep it that way especially in the DT. There is nothing growing in the sump tanks either and no signs of anything starting to grow. I am watching for that very closely.

You may or may not have any nitrate yet. With many nitrate kits, there is a massive interference of nitrite on nitrate testing. 1 ppm nitrite can read as 100 ppm nitrate with some of them.

 

[bdejong1112o]

You may or may not have any nitrate yet. With many nitrate kits, there is a massive interference of nitrite on nitrate testing. 1 ppm nitrite can read as 100 ppm nitrate with some of them.

I did read about that in a much larger thread on cycling and the chemistry of cycling a tank. I think it was by brandon429. What a read that was!

Is there a kit that does not have this issue or should I just not worry to much about it until later?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

I did read about that in a much larger thread on cycling and the chemistry of cycling a tank. I think it was by brandon429. What a read that was!

Is there a kit that does not have this issue or should I just not worry to much about it until later?

I'm not sure if there is a kit that avoids this complication.

 

[bdejong1112o]

I'm not sure if there is a kit that avoids this complication.

Well, that's not the answer I was looking for.

 

[Brew12]

Well, that's not the answer I was looking for.

Unfortunately, there isn't really a good way to measure nitrates. Our test kits work by breaking nitrates down into nitrites and testing for those. This is only accurate for nitrates when nitrites start at 0ppm.

With a large system like yours I would only dose up to 1ppm ammonia for a consumption test unless you are planning on adding a large amount of fish quickly.

If you think about it, a 220g tank processing 1ppm ammonia in 24 hours can safely handle more fish than a 40g tank that can process 4ppm ammonia in 24 hours. Fish don't generate more ammonia based on tank size!

 

[WWIII]

Yeah you're gonna have to wait for those nitrites to come down. They can take a little while, but usually when they do come down they 0 out very quickly. At that point you can see where your nitrates are and then decide how you want to go about it.

I would echo what Brew12 says about the ammonia dosing level and also caution to not "test" the cycle more than neccessary as this will only lead to more nitrates. Unfortunately having patience and doing nothing is really the best thing to do while cycling. You can add some bacteria in a bottle to help seed the rock with good bacteria, but still recommend letting the tank just do its thing!

 

[ChrisOFL]

This product will remove nitrates from water and bind it in a regenerable anion resin. I'm surprised more people do not know about it but it does work quite well. http://brightwellaquatics.com/products/nitratr.php

 

[CoralWealth]

This product will remove nitrates from water and bind it in a regenerable anion resin. I'm surprised more people do not know about it but it does work quite well. http://brightwellaquatics.com/products/nitratr.php

never heard of this but interested for my fish only tank

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

This product will remove nitrates from water and bind it in a regenerable anion resin. I'm surprised more people do not know about it but it does work quite well. http://brightwellaquatics.com/products/nitratr.php

I do not believe it is going to work they way they claim.