Red Sea Nitrate Test

[jondevans93]

hey guys so all but 1 rainbow anemone is left and traded the rest for sps!

(using red sea test kits)
so tank params
ammonia: 0
nitrite: 0
nitrate 50ppm
alk: 11.5
temp: 74F
sg: 1.024
calcium: need a good test kit (recommendations?)

so everything was fine and dandy til a little rainbow new let go and got pulled into my mp 10 while i was at work.. nitrates shot up to 50ppm from around 10ppm (on api test kit)

i did a water change of 4g using purified sea water yesterday and another 4g of sea water today..

my nitrates have not moved noticeably colour wise on the test still a darker purple this along with dosing no pox (red sea) concerns me that its had no change

anyone have advice here? or perhaps my test is faulty? all frags are doing great good extension and coloration apart from a christmas tree monti browned out on me i still see some red eyes hoping to bring it back.

also ordered red sea colour program and reef energy a and b.

 

[Josh]

Those nitrates are really high. I would suggest possibly adding a bio pellet reactor or getting a hang on back protein skimmer. Doing water changes twice a week at 10-15% would also help alot but realistically most people arent going to do that. Some corals handle the nitrates better than others. You could try Pro Bio F product. It is basically a bottled version of the bacteria that is on liverock only they selected and bred the strains that attack nitrates/phosphates.

I have the same test kit and ive never seen over 1ppm. I do find the test kits are hard to find your exact values. You could be well over 50 or you could be closer to 30 and its not that easy to tell. Either way anything over 5-10 is usually when people start to look why.

If you did some aquascaping during the coral transition its possible you stirred up a ton of crap from the sand bed. Water changes will definately fix this however.

I am by no means a "SPS guy" however i was under the impression that SPS feed off nitrates and if you have high nitrates they will "overfeed" and turn brown. If your SPS start to turn brown then you can basically confirm the presence of high nitrates.

Depending on what city you live in you could just take a sample to your LFS or a local TFT member and just confirm your readings.

Good luck.

 

[jondevans93]

ye looking at my lfs to test it for me. i did rescape with my new frags but my sand bed is many 2cm i like the look of sand but didn't want a detritus trap and the mp 10 does a good job kicking the detritus down to the socks below also there is a skimmer in the sump an i run no pox but even that isn't doing much... i did start dosing reef energy A and B from red sea could this have nitrates