Nitrate and You...or how to knock it down.

[Sk8r]

Nitrate can rise due to several factors.
1. lack of water changes
2. overfeeding
3. place where gunk builds up (sponges, bioballs, filters, uncleaned filter socks, you get the picture: if it can shed yellow-brown gunk, that's a nitrate choke-point. Waste is hanging there and causing a problem.)

You can lower nitrate by several means.
1. a program of large water changes, one every other day.
2. considering what kind of food and how much you're feeding. If you have a lot of bristleworms, as in the tank is alive with them---you're overfeeding. Cut back a bit. Of course, some fish are just messy. And a very large fish load means gunk---and nitrate.
3. clean places where gunk builds up. This is why successful reefs don't have filters/bioballs/uncleaned filter socks and gunk piles in the sump. Keep your sandbed healthy with a lot of subsand cleaners like nassarius snails and fighting conchs and a sand-sifting goby. It is ok to stir up a tiny nasty area of sand now and again (put a filter sock on and take off and wash it when water clears.) Just don't do a whole lot of kick-up at once.
4. ---there ARE things like Purigen, Nopox, and nitrate filter pads, even sulfur-based Nitrate Reactors that will help remove it. Older tanks (do not do this if your tank is under half a year) may also consider carbon dosing, qv, which increases bacteria to help out the problem. You need a decent skimmer if you're going to try carbon dosing.

What levels are tolerable? for a FOWLR, while they can go over 40 without killing your fish (some tanks can survive twice that), the inverts may have trouble, and you may start losing species.
For a REEF, shoot for .2. You may be ok at 20. But that's a POINT two, ideally. The ocean isn't big on nitrate: it doesn't have a lot of gunk pileup in a natural reef.

You can conclude that 'surviving it' isn't the optimum range: to have best success, do what you can to lower it as far as your system can, and whenever you're up against it---water changes: clean water is always a good thing. If you're trying to keep delicates, definitely do what you can to hammer it down, down, down.

[Pmj]

I'm always struggling around 15-20 in my tank, which is an AIO Solana. I wish I had went bigger and something with a sump to have more options.

Lately during water changes I've taken the time to make sure i try to suck out the back chambers, and that helped slightly, but still can't get it real low. As far as I can tell there is no place where junk is accumulating. I do have to run a small filter floss cutout in the overflow, if I didn't the junk would just go straight to the bottom of the first chamber. I clean it twice a week. I recently started vinegar, will see how it goes. I did try vodka in the past but got cyano. Currently dealing with GHA. I really think my rocks aren't the best, not really porous as they should be and pretty ugly. That would be one thing I'd like to try too. Tank is almost at 2 years old now.

[Sk8r]

Get one good dry rock and add it, then just keep improving them as each becomes alive. Eventually you can use the ugly rock in the sump when you get one.

20 is not bad: a reef can live with 20. Lower is better, however.

[mattgumaer]

Sk8r

I'm curious why you recommend no carbon dosing until a tank is six months old. I just started carbon dosing in a tank that is about a year old.

Matt

[Sk8r]

Just that after six months the OWNER (this being the novice forum) has gotten some experience under his belt and some inkling of the way things are supposed to look. I always fear that someone will recommend it word of mouth in the novice forum, with no qualifications like---you need a decent skimmer---and create a problem as somebody starts dosing inappropriately. I figure six months in, people know that there is a dosing schedule, a need for measurement, and a sense of procedures that will not dump a too-big starting dose of vinegar straight onto their new coral. If however your tank is NOT your first rodeo, you can better judge when, and are more likely to find the dosing table and follow it.

If you are still on that initial learning curve, where there are so many unfamiliar moving parts to track, a product like Purigen is a help.

[CStrickland]

Originally Posted by Pmj

Lately during water changes I've taken the time to make sure i try to suck out the back chambers, and that helped slightly, but still can't get it real low.

have you tried blowing stuff out the rocks by using a turkey baster or small powerhead? Doing that and cleaning the sand keeps my nitrates under 10

[Sk8r]

Likewise, sumps tend not to be lovely, but they shouldn't get gunky. Just setting a small pump like a maxijet or a powerhead so it'll kick up the detritus, and putting a filter sock on (I don't keep them on because I want micro-critters to be able to cycle through)---to be changed every 12 hours and washed,---can help a lot. Just don't kick up everything at once, because you need one undisturbed area (like your main tank sandbed) functioning to help deal with the kickup from the SMALL area being cleaned.