Hign nitrates - Page 2

George · #11 05-25-2008, 09:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fry Lover

If those stats are correct, i'd give serious thought almost starting over, thorough substrate clean up, 3 or 4 50% water change's over the course of a week, filter / filters clean up.

I am not saying that you need to panic about 250ppm nitrate, especially if the fish are looking ok (although obviously you'd want to try and bring it down), just advising caution over the pH, might not be a problem now, but could be if the pH is beginning to crash.

It might not be this, but one thing to be aware of is a build up of organic waste to such a level that the water becomes more acidic and the pH crashes. It happened to someone i know, and you want to make sure the pH doesn't continue to drop resulting in such low levels of pH where the filter bacteria die off.

If you do opt for a big clean up of tank, don't be too vigourous with the biological filter media, just make sure its not clogged up with crap and gunge.

If your set-up really is not packed with organic waste (which may not be visible to your eye) then i am not sure what's going on.

The only way i'd say it's anything to do with your filter's is if the biological media is literally covered in black sludge and become a massive nitrate factory!

If quite a bit of protein is going into the tank for the FRT (dont even know what they eat!) then you may want to consider some addition filtration support, such as Seachem Purigen.

Von, info that might be helpful

1. size of tank, occupants
2. water change routine over the past 3-4 months
3. what exactly goes in to the tank food wise in the average course of a week
4. is it planted? if so, is there some dying / rotting plants?
5. filter maintenance routine

Okey dokey, tank is 450 litres, 5' by 2' at it widest point (bow fronted) had my frt who eats fruit and veg, not much protein. 5 juvinile blackbelts, couple of plecs and a mixture of about 7 very small young CA cichlids. And 5 parrots

Tank has only been set up since march, 30% water change once a week, has sand as a substrate which collects all the poo on the surface, this all gets removed during wc.

food wise they get hikari gold cichlid pellets in the morning and some evenings not all they get blood worm, brineshrimp and sometimes prawns and peas, frt gets kiwi, figs, tomatoes, oranges, sera viformo pellets.

There are afew java fern plants which are fine, can't keep anything else as the turtle eats them.

filtration is a eheim 2217 cannister with a bag of ceramic rings and the rest id foam, clleaned once a month, just added a eheim pro 2 which has the efimech and all that stuff it comes with, only been on there less than 2 weeks so not cleaned yet.

hope this is helpful

Fry Lover · #12 05-25-2008, 02:25 PM

everything you mention above Von suggests that it's not due to what i thought it could have been (excessive organic waste). I was doubtful it was due to waste Von actually, as you have to let your tank get pretty messy for that to happen usually, and i wouldn't have expected that from you!

So i am stumped, it could just be nothing more than ordinary factors such as the Nitrate might not actually be as high as 250 as the kits get pretty hard to read at that level, could it possibly be that your nitrates are say 100? One way to make it easier to read nitrate's at high levels is to use 50% distilled water (or evian, volvic etc) and 50% tank water, check the colour and then double the result. I do this on my tanks, as i find it damn near impossible to get an accurate nitrate reading once it's over 30-40 on most test kits (the colours are too hard to differentiate over 40ppm)

Is there any bog wood in the tank? Although the effect this has on the water (pH and hardness) is not as much as many think really (depends on water KH normally i believe)

Von, according the water reports that are published on-line the pH of the tap-water in the Croyden region is in the 7.6 to 7.8 region as i expected. I believe this is the case for most of the London region and borders.

What pH test are you using?

George · #13 05-25-2008, 04:47 PM

I'm using tetra test strips i have another brand i bought off ebay and they both say the same

George · #14 05-25-2008, 04:51 PM

the colours are pretty hard to read but it's definately way too high, there is bog wood in the tank but as you said not convinced it's making the ph crash, i'll try to read the nitrates more acuratley with the distilled water.

Fry Lover · #15 05-25-2008, 05:10 PM

I'm not a fan of strips, and that includes the Tetra one's

They are okay in a way as they can give you a "baseline" figure, and basically you know your nitrates are high which is fair enough, but i'd bet you Von that your nitrates could be anything between 80-250 and i would have a flutter that they are not much above 100 if at all going by how you describe you're set-up

Shame you are so far, i'd come and do my Dr Lex nitrate testing with distilled water

If you can, get yourself an API liquid master test kit (quite cheap on ebay) and use the strips as dental floss

George · #16 05-27-2008, 01:08 PM

Thanks lex, ok i decided to do a big clean up, my tank is set up much like the old one with lava rock all the way up the back of the glass, i had floating plants in there, what i hadn't noticed was the spray bar from the external was blowing these plants down behind the rocks at the water surface and they were getting trapped, i moved the rocks and a good couple of handfuls of plants came out, they weren't rotten but certainley not super healthy, i'm thinking it could be this? can't for teh life of me think of anything else, did a 40% wc and the ph went up to 7 and no3 was reading 100 off the strips, i will get the liquid test, going to leave it a couple of days and see what the readings are like then and i will have a better idea if these plants were the cause. keep you posted

Fry Lover · #17 05-27-2008, 01:39 PM

Plants that are not doing well and dying off seem to be an aggravating factor in terms of Nitrate Von, i had it myself.

My heavily planted community tank (and heavily stocked with fish) used to give me Nitrate readings of about 10ppm even though (at the time) my tap-water was 30-40ppm and my non-planted tanks were coming in at between 60-100ppm

Over the course of a few months, i began to like the "natural" look and didn't bother removing decaying plant leaves or so any work cleaning the substrate whatsoever.

Decaying plants can also make the water more acidic (lower the pH) but because my tap-water is about 7.8 i thought i would leave it all be and see if the pH did reduce (it did, but not by much)

Anyway, moral of the story was, once my tank become a bit more "dirty" so to speak, the Nitrate's were always hovering about 40-60ppm, after i removed all signs of dying plants, a few weeks later a few water changes later, tank was running at about 20ppm Nitrate.

I used to ignore peeps who spoke about rotting plants causing Nitrate, i used to think it was only dead fish or uneaten food that did this, but we live and learn!

However Von, in a 450 litre tank, you'd have to have a lot of rotting or dying plants to cause that high nitrate, i still think it's partly the test kits playing up a bit.

My tank (300 litres) had loads of rotting leaves (big bulky leaves) and even then the Nitrate only went up by about 40ppm (ish)

George · #18 05-29-2008, 10:57 AM

I guess i'm grasping at straws, there wasn't many plants 2 handfuls max and they weren't even dead just a bit battered and some dead leaves, as the fish are still fine and nothing seems distressed i'm thinking you're right and the test kit is poo

Alan · #19 05-29-2008, 11:15 AM

Firstly the dip tests are pants!!!!! I had them reading ph 6.4 when in reality I had a ph of closer to 7.8 needles to say the ray that I was keeping at the time didn't make it!!!!!!!

Scrap the test kits for the time being the thing to focus on is that there is a difference between the tap and the tank that is large there should only be a small difference.

In your situation I would do the following:

Clean all filters to remove unwanted detritus, this is a big factor with high nitrates you can do as many water changes as you want but if you don't sort this you might as well not bother with the water changes.

I won't go into detail about this as I know you know your stuff needless to say it should all be cleaned in old tank water.

Once you have done this check through the tank to make sure there is nothing rotting in there, I doubt there will be as the pictures you have posted in the past have always been of immaculately tidy clean set ups.

Then carry out numerous water changes over a week say 40% every day for a week to bring the nitrate down and then see where you are.

I suspect you may not have been changing quite enough water during your partial water changes so this will mean instead of the nitrate baselining it is slowly creeping up over time.

I have had this happen to me before to fix it all I had to do was one extra water change a month.

George · #20 05-29-2008, 07:16 PM

Hey Alan, i did the filters and definately nothing nasty lurking in the tank, going to do another wc tonight and again probably sunday, was just puzzled as the tanks only been running since march and both externals were new. I'll kepp you posted, thanks