Nitrate problem Help

[domb54]

I have had my tank up for four years and have always had nitrates tanks a 54 corner with sump and 100 pounds of live rock and 50 pounds of live sand. tested my water from my rodi tds says 0. tried 10% water changes daily for a week didnt work still at 40ppm. ive tried everything other than chems. to do this. cleaned the rock, the sand, and filters. could my rock be the problem. only two clowns and lawnmower blenny. various soft corals. any suggestions would be appreciated

 

[JHemdal]

40ppm is the upper limit for some test kits to test for. I'd suggest that you take a sample of your tank water, dilute it exactly 50% with RO water and then test that. If you get a reading higher than 20ppm, then your actual nitrate levels may be higher than you think.

You also need to decide if you are going to track this as nitrate-nitrogen or nitrate ion. The latter reading will be 4.4 times higher than the former. So - if you are reading 40 ppm nitrate, that is only 9 ppm nitrate-nitrogen, and not really that high for a 4 year old tank. On the other hand, if you are reading this as nitrate-nitrogen, that equates to 176 ppm nitrate, and that is REALLY high....

Jay

 

[domb54]

test kit goes up to 100 tried half and it was 20 so maybe its just what it naturally wants to be at. No signs of fish or corals having any problem. Guess i will keep with water changes.

 

[benzreef]

changing small volumes doesn't lower nitrates as fast as large changes. That's all that has ever worked for me, and it makes sense

 

[Atlanticmarine]

How old is the test kit you are using? How heavy is the bioload? How large is the biomedia reserve? Do you have allot of algae I.e. Hair algae etc?

 

[celamb89]

I lowered my nitrates with 30% water changes every week for about 5 weeks and then started doing 10% water changes weekly. Another thing I started doing from week 1 was vodka dosing! It worked for me, my nitrates now read 0-2ppm.

 

[billryan]

I'm interested in the vodka dosing, can you explain what to do?
Thanx in advance, Bill

 

[celamb89]

http://www.melevsreef.com/vodka_dosing.html

Here is a link with dosing direction and explanation and so far. Personally, I followed the directions from the guy at my LFS who has an incredible tank. He said to start dosing my 42gal with 1ml and go up 1ml every 3 days until my nitrates started dropping or if my water got fuzzy I should go down to the last dosage and stick with that. Anyway I ended up dosing 9ml everyday. I dont know if this is the correct method or nor but its what I did, most of the people go a lot slower.
I believe there is a thread around here in RC somewhere on vodka dosing


Good luck!

 

[Canoe1]

Crazy....vodka dosing?? Sorry as i'm just getting back into the hobby again but does this really happen? How can anyone know the long term effects of this....just curious...

Regards,

 

[IridescentLily]

Crazy....vodka dosing?? Sorry as i'm just getting back into the hobby again but does this really happen? How can anyone know the long term effects of this....just curious...

Regards,

That's hard to answer in one post here. There has been testing going on in various forum sections on rc. If you do an rc search on "vodka dosing" it'll bring up voluminous amounts of threads which have more data on this method.

 

[Ryno368]

another way to lower nitrates and keep them down is to make a algal scrubber

thats what i use and my nitrates are not detectable

 

[Pufferpunk]

Are you running a sponge or canister filter? I dose vitamin C for 0 nitrate & phosphate.