I know what will help. It's a certain type of water change that will lower them because I had the same problem and this water change helped. Get either RO water or distilled for the water change. I got this off of another site and it does work! Start out with 20 gallons of mixed water, and put it in a big container. I mixed my water up in five gallon buckets then added it to a 35 gallon rubbermaid container.
You then suction out 10 gallons from your 55 gallon tank into the container that contains the 20 gallons of clean water. Let that aeriate for a few minutes. I usually let it mix for 5 to 10 minutes with a couple of powerheads.
Then take 10 gallons out of the container a put it back into your 55 gallon tank.
Do this same thing 3 more times.
Have another 20 gallons of water mixed up to go through this same process again. So that means you need 40 gallons of water mixed up all together.
I'm telling you that this deffinately works. I tried it myself.
Well I at least did it half way. The other 20 gallons of water that I had I just used for a regular water change.
Well you think about it, going through this process you are actually changing out 40 gallons each time you do this process.
I almost forgot about the 20 gallons that you have left over after doing the water changes. Just dump the dirty 20 gallons out. By this time it's full of nitrates. As I was doing this I tested the container for nitrates it was going up after each time, but not near as high as I had in my tank.
Make sure your specific gravity and the temperature of the water that you mix up is the same and everything should be alright.
I wish that I done the same thing with the second 20 gal. as I did with the first 20 gal. My nitrates probably would have been lower than what they were. I'm going to try this again in a week to bring my nitrates on down. My nitrates read off the scale when I started and at least I got a reading after I was done. They were between 60 and 80 ppm. The web site where I got this said that if you do this type of water change that nitrates reading 80ppm would be down to 30ppm. That is a cignificant decrease. All I know is that it worked for me and I had tried everything before this. Good Luck.
kraig m.
You then suction out 10 gallons from your 55 gallon tank into the container that contains the 20 gallons of clean water. Let that aeriate for a few minutes. I usually let it mix for 5 to 10 minutes with a couple of powerheads.
Then take 10 gallons out of the container a put it back into your 55 gallon tank.
Do this same thing 3 more times.
Have another 20 gallons of water mixed up to go through this same process again. So that means you need 40 gallons of water mixed up all together.
I'm telling you that this deffinately works. I tried it myself.
Well I at least did it half way. The other 20 gallons of water that I had I just used for a regular water change.
Well you think about it, going through this process you are actually changing out 40 gallons each time you do this process.
I almost forgot about the 20 gallons that you have left over after doing the water changes. Just dump the dirty 20 gallons out. By this time it's full of nitrates. As I was doing this I tested the container for nitrates it was going up after each time, but not near as high as I had in my tank.
Make sure your specific gravity and the temperature of the water that you mix up is the same and everything should be alright.
I wish that I done the same thing with the second 20 gal. as I did with the first 20 gal. My nitrates probably would have been lower than what they were. I'm going to try this again in a week to bring my nitrates on down. My nitrates read off the scale when I started and at least I got a reading after I was done. They were between 60 and 80 ppm. The web site where I got this said that if you do this type of water change that nitrates reading 80ppm would be down to 30ppm. That is a cignificant decrease. All I know is that it worked for me and I had tried everything before this. Good Luck.
kraig m.
