Moved tank, now HIGH nitrates

[P.Kelly]

I moved a tank on Sunday and now my Nitrates are super high.

I moved about 100 lbs of well established (6 years) live rock in water, a TON of coral and a cleanup crew on Sunday. It took me 6-7 hours to get all the last bits of coral back into the new tank with new bagged live sand (I tossed the old stuff as there was a bit more bristle worms than i was prepared to combat).

I reused 50 gallons of the old water with 50 gallons of new water. Last night my ammonia and nitrites were 0 and my Nitrates were in the 60 range. I performed a 30 gallon (30%) water change and it cut the nitrates down to 30.

I did not check the nitrates on the tank before the move (shame on me). Any ideas on the most likely culprit, junk from the old sand, coral being bagged for many hours...

If I see the nitrates go back up again and the ammonia and nitrates stay low what would this mean?

I have a sump and refugium with cheeto algae (no sand or rock in the refugium yet (tehcnical issue), and Euroreef CS6-1 running on my 92 gallon corner. There are no fish in the tank at this time, but a few serpent stars, and urchins along with the crabs, snails and a CB shrimp to combat any hitchhiking bristleworms.

 

[WaterKeeper]

In a tank with a functioning DSB a move is a serious event. When the bed is disturbed it loses the zones that were established in the bed to provide denitrification. That can make nitrates soar. It is only temporary however and the tank will come back to its old form in a couple of weeks. Keep up with the water changes in the meantime until things settle down.

 

[deklin]

Disturbing a DSB will expose anerobic bacteria zones to oxygen which will kill the bacteria and create ammonia. It is likely that this occured and the ammonia was broken down by the nitrites which in turn led to high nitrate levels.

Keep an eye on it, but it should slowly drop down after your live rock and new live sand have a chance to do what they do best.

 

[P.Kelly]

Should I continue daily water changes to keep the nitrates in the 10-20 range until the bacteria can take it lower?

 

[chunchma]

Would that also happen if I added new sand to my existing sand? After I added the new sand I took a stick and stirred the new sand into the old sand. Would that cause the nitrates to jump as well?

Thanks - I did not mean to hijack your thread petes97

 

[P.Kelly]

No worries. I can tell you from person experience that you did not want to stir the old sand up... You are probably going to get some nasty stuff in your tank now, like Cyanobacteria blooms, and high nitrates.

I had this happen on another tank I moved 2 weeks ago and I didn't even stir up the sand, but it did get mixed a little bit in transit.

 

[rolyguy7]

IMO, I would do smaller water changes on a daily basis instead of large ones on a weekly basis. Doing smaller changes allows for the system to stabilize quicker since with large water changes you end up tossing away a lot of good bacteria. I just had something similar happen while redoing my aquascape. However my nitrates didn't get as high as yours. I did try to minimize moving the sand however. Nitrate eating bacteria reproduces at a much slower pace than nitrite and ammonia eating bacteria. You'll have to give the system time to reproduce this bacteria to high enough levels to handle the nitrates.

 

[kevin2000]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10218680#post10218680 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by petes97
Should I continue daily water changes to keep the nitrates in the 10-20 range until the bacteria can take it lower?

Makes sense to me ... just monitor the nitrate level and adjust the water change accordingly.

 

[P.Kelly]

I performed a 15 gallon water change tonight (about 15%) and checked again 30 minutes later.

Ammonia - 0
Nitrite - 0
Nitrate approx 30ppm

So, based upon 2 days number if I change 30 gallons I can bring the nitrates down, but I only change 15 gallons I can maintain 30ppm.

With about 100-125 lbs of good quality live rock, a sizable coral population, cleanup crew, no fish, a few urchins and starfish, and a fresh bed of Caribsea "live sand", what should my "upper limit" on Nitrates be (for water change purposes) until it gets under control on its own.

Here's a quick picture so you can see what all is in the tank. This was a transfer from another tank on Sunday afternoon. I have not yet aquascaped, as I'm trying to get the water chemistry under control.

 

[P.Kelly]

Also, I'm going away for the weekend. I know, timing could be worse. So, I'm thinking I need to go back to 30 gallon (30%) changes everyday up until then to bring the nitrates down low enough that they have some room to rise over the weekend?

 

[papagimp]

FYI, I recently moved a large amount of rock from my tank and replaced it with newer better non base rock stuff, I'm assuming this is my culprit but a month or so later I ended up with about $400 in dead sps throughout the tank, tested water (which I didn't do often anyways) and ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate were all maxed out on my color charts. It's been almost 6 months now and ammonia/nitrite/nitrate are all still well above where they should be. I add a capful weekly (55g tank) of seachem's PRIME to combat ammonia/nitrite toxicity and surpisingly, after this long and with water quality being as poor as it is, my monitporas are growing very well, all my LPS look fabulous, zoo's are going nuts all over the place, my larger hairy mushrooms have all split, but look great. Too much livestock to list but my loses were limited to one bangaii cardinal, and the sps corals mentioned earlier. That was only a mere fraction of the livestock in the tank, and all current livestock is acting like nothings wrong at all. Praise be to PRIME!

 

[P.Kelly]

Nitrates were still 30ppm last night, so I did a 30 gallon water change, after which Nitrates were ~25ppm. I added the standard does of Prime to the tank (slowly into the sump) and this morning Nitrates were down to ~17ppm.

I'm planning another 30 gallon change tonight and I'm running out of salt mix. My next 3 buckets won't be here until Tuesday.

Has anyone had experience using Prime as an emergency Nitrate detox solution? Does it really bind up the Nitrates so that the can be skimmed out, or does it just mask them on the test kit (I use API tests).

Please give a detailed explanation why, if you think Prime is junk.