nitrates through the roof
- Thread starter bigmatt76
- Start date
the only way I know of to reduce nitrates is with a water change. You may need to do several daily for awhile. Also test your water supply to see what's going in. If you search around, you'll find several recent threads about water quality problems, including high nitrates.
A good vacumning of the gravel with 25%+ PWC is a darn good start at reducing NO3 (nitrate). I'd also recommend depending on what type of filter you have, rinsing your filter media and flushing the media chamber clean with tank water. Rinsing media/ media chamber with tank water will not harm your bio-bacteria, alot of gunk in your filter can generate alot of NO3.
Id say 2 back to back 50% water changes are needed. They test for ammoina and nitrites, to find where it is all comming from.
Nitrate in FO tanks comes from fish and their food. No established tank should ever show any detectable ammonia or nitrite. If it builds up too fast or to to overly high levels, you have too many fish, overfeed, or don't do enough water changes - or any and all of those.
