Help!! Nitrates!!

[whoopper]

Hi,

I'm Havng problems with nitrates on my tank. I perform the test yesterday and they were on 100. From other posts i now i have to change my Bio balls on the wet/Dry to LR and cheato. but how do i perform that? right now i really don't have the money to expend on a new refugium, so i was thinking on try to do it my self a simple refugium without expend to much money.Ideas?? Or maybe use the wet/dry space to put the rock and cheato .I dont know if this can be done. Where do i put the rock and cheato?
On my 55g i have approx 50-55 lbs of LR.

Here is a drawing of my wet/dry .


Please any ideas on how to solve this problem will be really appreciated.

 

[Sk8r]

Bioballs are a known nitrate problem.

First, do a 20% water change. That will lower them. Keep at it daily till you get it lower.
Running carbon will remove any ammonia.
Take the bioballs out, handful a day. Don't do it all at once or you're likely to crash your tank. Just leave that chamber empty or put in a handful of cheatomorpha algae and keep a light on it 15 hours a day.
You should have porous live rock, 1-2 lbs per gallon. That will do what the bioballs do without accumulating crud that builds up nitrate.

 

[Avi]

Well, it shouldn't be a big problem, whoops....Can you take the bio-ball chamber out of the sump altogether? If you can, do just as Sk8r says, remove the bui-balls gradually. Once they're out of the sump, take out the chamber.

There are ideal ways of setting up a refugium inside your sump, but just do your best to move the two pumps in such a way that you'd clear an area in the center of the sump where you can grow Chaeto. You can even seperate that area somewhat using some eggcrate material that would only have to be cut to size and set in the sump. The Chaeto would be grown between the two pieces of eggcrate.

The only expense you'd encounter really, is the light that you'd need in order to foster a good growth of Chaeto. Get a lighting fixture that has a bulb that's as close to 6500K as you can get. Here's the one that I use which you can get a Home Depot:

http://www.lightsofamerica.com/floods.htm

You can use models 9027, 9265 or 9266 (click specifications) depending on how you’d mount it over the sump.

You can also go to

www.melevsreef.com, where Melev recommends this bulb:

http://melevsreef.com/fuge_bulb.html

I found the one I use to be more effective but a lot of people do report good results with Melev’s recommendation. If your sump isn’t big, I’d go with Melev’s recommendation, and with a simple bulb-mount, it will be quite inexpensive.