Hi guys. I have a coralife biocube 29g. Today marks the 7th week its been up and running. I started off with all dry rock and live sand. I had one damsel until week 6. During the time I believe that my tank cycled. It went through all of the spikes and eventually leveled off. However, on week 6, I got rid of my damsel and picked up a pair of ocellaris clowns. Ever since I got my clowns Ive been struggling with nitrates. They hover around 5-10 ppm. I've been feeding rather light and suck out any remaining/uneaten food with a turkey baster one my fish are done eating. I think my issues are due to doubling my bioload. With that being said, is there anything I can do besides doing a few large waterchanges to get my trates back under control? Is my tank going through a mini cycle again? And I know clowns are rather hardy so they should be able to handle a little bit of high nitrates right? Thanks in advance!
Will my nitrate issue solve itself?
- Thread starter aSpottedCow
- Start date
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No skimmer, and 15-20lbs or so of rock
Mandrew
Well-Known Member
My tank sits between 10&20ppm nitrates and I don't have any issues. Very little algae too. Unless you have sps corals I don't think nitrates are as significant as people say. Also I don't think nitrates really affect fish much if at all? My tank was neglected for a while and my nitrates were reading off the chart at 120+ ppm with API test. My clownfish acted just fine. I obviously took care of the problem but still run between 10-20 as of now. I have added a HOB fuge and a skimmer to try and get them to 0 and maybe get some SPS though [emoji4]
Your nitrates of 5 - 10 should be fine. Do you maintain a have a regular waterchange schedule? How often and how much? When I ran my BC29, I did weekly 5 gallon water changes. My nitrates were 0. I had to actually dose nitrates in order to keep my coral from starving.
I've always had high nitrates, have a small 120 litre with quite a large bioload, religiously did 10% water changes. Eventually started changing my sock weekly, used purign and set up a refugeeum. Nitrates finally down to 5 after a year long battle!
danielsalt
Community Member
There are generally too few nitrate-eating bacteria in a tank to keep nitrates near zero unless you activly remove them, what goes in must come out.
A skimmer removes some, macroalgae can remove some, as do waterchanges - I would call those 3 the most common means of export, perhaps along with carbondosing. If you do "nothing", nitrates wont go down.
A skimmer removes some, macroalgae can remove some, as do waterchanges - I would call those 3 the most common means of export, perhaps along with carbondosing. If you do "nothing", nitrates wont go down.
mcarroll
10K Club member
You're mostly doing fine with the tank....but your nerves might use some relaxing. 
I hope I can help on that front...
A) Definitely not worth worrying this much about.....sit back and observe more and try (I know it's hard-especially at this stage) to worry less.
B) 5-10 ppm of NO3 is healthy and so is normal algae growth. Corals would also use it up if you had any. Normal algae growth is what you control easily with grazers, BTW. Starving algae, by contrast, is mostly inedible and can have even-worse qualities. (This is somewhat characteristic of all photosynthetic critters.)
C) Check your nutrient balance – N and P. Has your nitrate supply exceeded your phosphate supply? What is your phosphate level?
D) If there is uneaten food for you to get with a turkey baster, you are probably feeding wrong – not feeding too much. (Starving your fish is no better an idea than starving the tank.) Feed only half the amount you are feeding and see if there are still "leftovers". If that works, then just feed that smaller quantity twice as frequently as you normally feed. You can incrementally try to feed more at once to test how much your fish will eat before they start leaving "leftovers" again. I highly recommend an auto-feeder and feeding ring (or equivalent like the Eheim feedingSTATION) to keep your portion size small and feeding frequency more consistent. You should still feed some fresh, unprocessed foods by hand too (as much as possible in fact), so don't over-do it with the feeder, use it to fill in the gaps of time when you can't feed.
E) Doubling your bio-load from 1 fish to 2 fish did not do anything bad to your tank! ....that's one of the best slow progressions in livestocking I can imagine. Adding one fish, then beefing up the CUC and adding a coral, then adding the 2nd fish is the only way to do it better IMO, and that's not a big difference. I don't think this should be a source of worry for you at all....most folks dump loads of 5-10 fish or corals in at once. (And get colossal algae blooms to match more often than not.)
I hope I can help on that front...A) Definitely not worth worrying this much about.....sit back and observe more and try (I know it's hard-especially at this stage) to worry less.
B) 5-10 ppm of NO3 is healthy and so is normal algae growth. Corals would also use it up if you had any. Normal algae growth is what you control easily with grazers, BTW. Starving algae, by contrast, is mostly inedible and can have even-worse qualities. (This is somewhat characteristic of all photosynthetic critters.)
C) Check your nutrient balance – N and P. Has your nitrate supply exceeded your phosphate supply? What is your phosphate level?
D) If there is uneaten food for you to get with a turkey baster, you are probably feeding wrong – not feeding too much. (Starving your fish is no better an idea than starving the tank.) Feed only half the amount you are feeding and see if there are still "leftovers". If that works, then just feed that smaller quantity twice as frequently as you normally feed. You can incrementally try to feed more at once to test how much your fish will eat before they start leaving "leftovers" again. I highly recommend an auto-feeder and feeding ring (or equivalent like the Eheim feedingSTATION) to keep your portion size small and feeding frequency more consistent. You should still feed some fresh, unprocessed foods by hand too (as much as possible in fact), so don't over-do it with the feeder, use it to fill in the gaps of time when you can't feed.
E) Doubling your bio-load from 1 fish to 2 fish did not do anything bad to your tank! ....that's one of the best slow progressions in livestocking I can imagine. Adding one fish, then beefing up the CUC and adding a coral, then adding the 2nd fish is the only way to do it better IMO, and that's not a big difference.
I don't think this should be a source of worry for you at all....most folks dump loads of 5-10 fish or corals in at once. (And get colossal algae blooms to match more often than not.)
I'm doing a weekly 3 so about 10%. That should be well enough though, right?
You're mostly doing fine with the tank....but your nerves might use some relaxing.
A) Definitely not worth worrying this much about.....sit back and observe more and try (I know it's hard-especially at this stage) to worry less.
B) 5-10 ppm of NO3 is healthy and so is normal algae growth. Corals would also use it up if you had any. Normal algae growth is what you control easily with grazers, BTW. Starving algae, by contrast, is mostly inedible and can have even-worse qualities. (This is somewhat characteristic of all photosynthetic critters.)
C) Check your nutrient balance – N and P. Has your nitrate supply exceeded your phosphate supply? What is your phosphate level?
D) If there is uneaten food for you to get with a turkey baster, you are probably feeding wrong – not feeding too much. (Starving your fish is no better an idea than starving the tank.) Feed only half the amount you are feeding and see if there are still "leftovers". If that works, then just feed that smaller quantity twice as frequently as you normally feed. You can incrementally try to feed more at once to test how much your fish will eat before they start leaving "leftovers" again. I highly recommend an auto-feeder and feeding ring (or equivalent like the Eheim feedingSTATION) to keep your portion size small and feeding frequency more consistent. You should still feed some fresh, unprocessed foods by hand too (as much as possible in fact), so don't over-do it with the feeder, use it to fill in the gaps of time when you can't feed.
E) Doubling your bio-load from 1 fish to 2 fish did not do anything bad to your tank! ....that's one of the best slow progressions in livestocking I can imagine. Adding one fish, then beefing up the CUC and adding a coral, then adding the 2nd fish is the only way to do it better IMO, and that's not a big difference.
Thanks a ton! I've done from water tanks for years so I don't know what saltwater is stressing me out so much. But thanks, a lot for your reply!
mcarroll
10K Club member
That's too easy...
- Cost is about x100
- There's about x100 more things going on....much of which is necessarily out of your control. (this gets a lot of people!)
- There's about x100 more conflicting information online about "what's best".
- !!
That's too easy...
Need we go on?
- Cost is about x100
- There's about x100 more things going on....much of which is necessarily out of your control. (this gets a lot of people!)
- There's about x100 more conflicting information online about "what's best".
- !!
Very true lol. And I obsess over stuff so I think I'm actually doing TOO much research and overwhelming myself lol
No corals yet! Hoping to pick some up next weekend though! Will inverts such as hermits and snails be able to handle those nitrates though?
NickNiz
Active Member
I don't have any hermits but my turbo and nassarius snails are fine. And my other inverts such as serpent star and Coral Banded Shrimp are doing well too... my nitrate typically hovers around 15, and I'm doing 1.5 to 2 gallon water changes on my 12 gal to keep it like that!
