Nitrates help

[Chris82]

65 gallon. fluval filter,led light. live rock mixed reef.
i have been having high nitrate problem for ever... i bought system used 2 years ago and think its probably 6 years old now.
i unfortunatly did not know better and used the used sand. i have been told this was a mistake and have now over a period of time got 80 percent of it vacumed out. but i still have issues.

has anyone heard of live rock becoming saturated over time.?

any help on this would be apreciated.
cheers chris

[Reef Pilot]

Yup, I inherited a 10 year old tank, and the sand and rock was saturated with organics producing nitrates (as high as 100 ppm) and phosphate. I tried many things, incl vacuuming sand, rinsing rocks, refugium full of chaeto, but was not winning the war.

Finally I installed a bio-pellet reactor and with the use of MB7, brought down my nitrates to zero over a period of many months, where they have stayed now for a long time. Interestingly, while I still run the bio pellet reactor, my bio pellets are not being consumed to any degree anymore, and have not had to add any for almost a year. So I guess the nitrates have finally all been pulled out of the sand and rocks. I also have orange spot gobies which constantly sift the sand, so that helps rinse it clean, too.

[Myanth]

I'd be concerned with the fluval first. Any time that I have introduced filter media it becomes a magnet for nitrates as caught organics deteriorate. I believe in high water flow, 1lb/gal of rock and .5lb/gal of sand. Keep as much sand surface uncovered as possible to prevent dead spots in the sand and only media filter once every couple of months with an agitation of the sandbed (I use a powerhead to stir things up)

[asylumdown]

ditto on the fluval being part of the problem. It sounds counter-intuitive, but in a reef tank you should actually aim to limit the substrate upon which the nitrogen cycle can occur. It's one of those 'if you build it they will come' sort of things. If you put infrastructure in place that bypasses any opportunity for nitrogen containing waste materials to be consumed by macro organisms that might turn it in to more biomass, or exported via mechanical means and go straight towards heterotropic decomposition by bacteria, you're almost guaranteeing you'll struggle with high nitrates. You want just as much nitrification taking place to keep the amount of ammonia produced during fish and invertebrate respiration under control. You want as little organic solids decomposing in your water as possible.

[Magickiwi]

Rather than jumping to a solution at this point I think you should provide more information on your system. It’s 65g mixed reef suffering from high nitrates. OK what else?
A) Are your other waste parameters high? i.e. ammonia, nitrite, phosphate?
B) What media are you running in your Fluval?
C) How often and what volume of water changes do you do?
D) How many fish and coral in your 65g?
E) What have you tried so far to help yourself? (Increased water changes are step 1 and reducing feeding is step 2 but what able other things like cleaning your Fluval bi-weekly? Etc.)
F) Does anything work to lower your nitrates?
G) How much do you feed? How often?
H) Do you have a lot of green/brown algae?
I) What sort of display items do you have in your tank? Just rock?
J) Are you on city or well water?

I’m on board with the idea of tossing that Fluval in the can, mostly because they are junk vs. the belief that all things nitrate spring from a canister filter. There are loads of people that run canister filters successfully. They may take a little more maintenance than a sump but if you have more time than money…

[asylumdown]

While I very much concur with Magic Kiwi in regards to more info being welcome, if occam's razor is generally true, a tank with a canister filter, no export equipment (I assume the OP would have mentioned a skimmer in the original post if one was present), and persistently high nitrates is one of those things where I'd deal with the obvious first.

People who are successful with canisters long term are dealing with the nitrates produced. Whether they have set something up intentionally like a biopellet reactor, or they're lucky and have high innate de-nitrifying capacity in their sand and rocks and just don't know it, the nitrates are being made and they are being somehow consumed/exported/broken down.

Even cleaning the filter more often probably won't help, unless you're cleaning it every other day like you would with a filter sock. The food and poop bits that get trapped will be turned in to nitrate within a couple days of getting caught in the filter floss in a microbially active filter.

doing more water changes is definitely an option, but to deal with sky high nitrates you'd need to be doing massive water changes very frequently to make much of a dent. If hypothetically you have a tank with 100ppm nitrates, you'd need to do a 95% water change with nitrate free water to get the levels down to 'acceptable' in a single shot, or you'd need to do 13 20% water changes (2.5 times your total system volume) in a row, assuming no new nitrate was being added to the water column (which is most certainly is). More water changes will obviously help, but they're a horribly inefficient way of dealing with nitrates unless you're down with doing 65% water changes twice a week.

Dealing with nutrients in your system requires you to manage them on two ends - the production and the consumption/removal.

1. Make sure your'e feeding them just as much as they can eat without much left after 2-5 minutes. If you're already doing that, it's not really fair to them to restrict their diet and make them go hungry as a means to dealing with nutrient problems when there are better, structural ways to deal with it.

2. Find ways to limit the nitrification process. There's a great article in Advanced aquarist that deals with this whole thing that you can find here:http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2003/8/chemistry but I'll quote the point that's relevant to this -

"Remove Existing Filters Designed To Facilitate The Nitrogen Cycle. Such filters do a fine job of processing ammonia to nitrite to nitrate, but do nothing with the nitrate. It is often non-intuitive to many aquarists, but removing such a filter altogether may actually help reduce nitrate. So slowly removing them and allowing more of the nitrogen processing to take place on and in the live rock and sand can be beneficial.

It is not that any less nitrate is produced when such a filter is removed, it is a question of what happens to the nitrate after it is produced.

When it is produced on the surface of media such as bioballs, it mixes into the entire water column, and then has to find its way, by diffusion, to the places where it may be reduced (inside of live rock and sand, for instance).

If it is produced on the surface of live rock or sand, then the local concentration of nitrate is higher there than in the first case above, and it is more likely to diffuse into the rock and sand to be reduced to N2."

If your tank doesn't have a sump, it might feel like you need the canister filter, but think about what that filter is actually doing and whether or not you need it. 95% of modern sumped tanks run without any bio-media at all (and unless you clean your canister filter floss every other day, it's biomedia) and none of them suffer an ammonia-pocalypse. If you've got even a moderate amount of rock and supplementary current you've probably got ample surface area for the necessary nitrification bacteria to do their job right in the display.

This also extends to trying to both encourage the consumption of waste by animals before the bacteria have a chance to get to it, and finding ways to remove the un-decomposed waste from a tank altogether. It's better for food that your fish miss to get eaten by pods and worms than decompose in a canister filter, and it's even better for it to be removed by a skimmer or filter sock that is changed daily or every other day. Do you have a skimmer?

3. Add some element to your tank that is specifically dedicated to removing nitrate that does not require inefficient interventions with human muscle power (i.e., water changes). The advanced aquarist article has a few suggestions, one of which being a deep sand bed that a lot of people on here would never put in their tanks, but have you considered adding a small biopellet reactor to your system? You'd be far better served by replacing the canister with a small skimmer and pellet reactor than removing all your sand. Some people here won't get near biopellets either, but it's just one of many different systems that exist to process nitrate. There are also adsorbent resins, other kinds of reactors, fuges with exportable macro algae, etc.

[Chris82]

Thanks for all the info gives me a couple things to try and change. And thanksnfor the article link!

[Chris82]

Any suggestions on brand of reactor to buy?

[Reef Pilot]

My recommendation is the Vertex reactors. Has a valve on the input side to easily control the flow and tumble of the bio pellets. And totally maintenance free. I have not opened mine up for almost a year now. No need for a separate pump either. I run mine off a T from my return pump output line. The output of the reactor goes to my skimmer. And because of their vertical design, they take a very small footprint.

They are not expensive either, compared to some others. And totally effective. I brought my nitrates down from a high of 100 ppm to zero, where they have been now for the last year. But you need to use MB7 with the bio pellets, or you will have other troubles, like cyano, clumping, etc.

[asylumdown]

I haven't looked in to aquarium equipment other than lighting for almost 2 years, so I'm a little behind on what's new and hot.

What did you want to put in it?

[Chris82]

honestly I don't know lol. I have no experience or knowledge in the area of reactors.
just need to get nitrates under control.
I am running a skimmer E SHOPS rated for 100 gallons on my 65 gallon tank.
my gut feeling is my rock and whts left of the sand bed are just saturated

[Chris82]

i honestly don't have a clue what i want in it.i have no knowledge or experience with reactors. just need to get nitrates down.
thanks pilot mike.
when you say run mb7 with the pellets. is there a certain brand of pellet you suggest

[Reef Pilot]

when you say run mb7 with the pellets. is there a certain brand of pellet you suggest
I use the Vertex bio pellets as well. Here are some instructions from them.
http://www.vertexaquaristik.com/Portals/0/Pro-Bio%20Pellets%20FAQ.pdf

And these are the MB7 instructions. I dose it about 2 weeks before starting the bio pellets, and then ongoing.
http://brightwellaquatics.com/products/microbacter7t.php

You can get everything you need at J&L.

[NjOy]

have a look at the cad lights nr-1; has pump on the reactor and also hob

just a reminder; to add bio pellets slowly to the system
be patient...