Reducing nitrate

[mdhnatow]

Hey guys,

After letting my aquarium establish itself for about 4 months, I figured its time to fine tune my water quality. Since my cycle, my nitrates have been around 10 ppm, so I've been concentrating on reducing that. Here's what I do so far:

I do weekly water changes (about 13%),
I've been protein skimming for a few weeks (pulling good, dry skimmate).
My top-off water and water-change water tests 0 nitrate.
I feed sparingly. Small pinch of flake food once a day and none on the weekends... (too busy)

I dont expect my nitrates to go down immediately, but how long should it take to get them near zero?
I was thinking about starting a vodka dosing regimen to pull out more. What do you think? Is there anything else I should be doing.

Tank specs below.

Thanks.

 

[BuckeyeTodd]

I don't see a prob with trates of 10, you can have a very succesfull tank with trates double that...Unless you are running a sps heavy tank, 10 nitrates won't hurt you a bit

 

[Palting]

How quickly it goes down depends on a lot of variables, so it would be impossible to predict. What I would suggest is check your nitrates just before each water change. This way you will know how much it's dropping, or changing. Depending on what your findings are, you can do more frequent or larger volume WC's, or maybe even less .

I would not recommend vodka dosing unless both the aquarium and the aquarist are more established. I would much rather you started looking at refugiums with macro as a long term added nitrate export.

 

[mdhnatow]

Thanks guys. Im not able to incorporate macro in my refugium until next month (changing the sump) But when I can, I will!