He does regular water changes but it only takes a couple of days for the nitrate level to go back up again (as noted by test kit). I was visiting him a few weeks ago and he showed me how it crawls back up over a few days. I couldn't find anything obviously wrong and my hypothesis was that the levels were so high that he simply wasn't removing enough water to fix the problem. So for four days in a row we did a morning 20% change, tested the water that night and did another change. For about 4 days in a row, the level was at the lowest the kit would show so we thought we had fixed the problem. Currently in the tank he doesn't have any big eaters so he wasn't feeding but every few days so I don't think over feeding was the problem. We tested his source water and it was OK; we also had both his source water and his tank water (when it was heavily in nitrates) at two LFS's and they confirmed our diagnosis (so we know its not the source water or the kit). i had him remove the sponge from his HOB filter thinking that might be the problem but it seems that we had it under control. Then last week, it got bad again and he was back to making daily water changes. I convinced him to junk his prizm and buy a new CPR bakpak and to remove the HOB filter entirely...the bakpak has only been running for a few days so its hard to tell if that's the fix or not. Anything we missed or could try out? He'd understandably like to get this under control. Thanks in advance.
An intro and a couple of questions (pt 2)
- Thread starter mrkerr
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