Nitrates....Meet Your Master (Finally)

[jonboyb]

After a 3 month battle with nitrates hovering around 15-20 I've finally turned the tide. No amount of PWC's and reduced feeding could ever touch them but I finally buckled and DEEP vacumed a portion of my sandbed (only 1-2" of coarse sand, not CC) along with a small PWC and it's already to 5ppm with normal feedings after 2 days. I had always vacumed the top of my sand and rock for loose detrius, etc but I never guessed my thin sandbed could have been harboring the issue. I have a sifting goby and tons of nassarius snails but they just didn't turn the bed good enough I guess.

I hated to do a deep vacumn of the sand for the loss of pods, spaghetti worms, etc in there but it appears to have been worth it. I only vacumed a portion of the bed too and still had a huge decrease in nitrates (but the flow in my tank tends to push everything to the front which is where I vacumed at). They may be back tomorrow.....but victory is mine tonight.....and victory is sweet:thumbs:

 

[parsonsaj]

I had tried everything to get my nitrates down to acceptable levels (my readings were off the chart on the Seachem test kit). Massive water changes, sand bed vacuumings, adding a coil denitrator, etc. I got the readings down to the upper levels of the test kit, but wanted them lower.

I decided to start dosing AZ-NO3. After about 2 weeks of this, my nitrates are totally undetectable... not even a tinge of pink when running the nitrate test now! My suspicion is that I have paid $20 for a bottle of sugar water, but I have to say the stuff works as advertised. I am now in the weaning off process and hopefully my coil denitrator will now be able to process the load once I have the dosing down to a minimal/non-existant level.