How to get nitrates down

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When you use the water conditioner, make sure you add enough for the full volume of the tank, or treat the water while it is in the bucket. The dechlorinator works based on a percentage or ratio in the water, so if you change 50 percent and only dose for 50% you'll actually only have half the treatment required for the tank. Best of luck!

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If you are still reading nitrite, your tank isn't fully cycled yet.
DO NOT clean the filter media at all at this point.

I would also recommend testing your tap water. Mine comes out of the tap with nitrates in 30's.
So if your tap water isn't great, water changes won't help much. :(
 
When you use the water conditioner, make sure you add enough for the full volume of the tank, or treat the water while it is in the bucket. The dechlorinator works based on a percentage or ratio in the water, so if you change 50 percent and only dose for 50% you'll actually only have half the treatment required for the tank. Best of luck!

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As long as he already treated the contents in the tank, if he does a 50% water change he will only need to dose enough conditioner for 50% of the tank's volume. Half of the water in the tank will already be dechlorinated.
 
As long as he already treated the contents in the tank, if he does a 50% water change he will only need to dose enough conditioner for 50% of the tank's volume. Half of the water in the tank will already be dechlorinated.

No, if you are adding untreated tap water directly to the tank you need to treat for the full volume of the tank.

If you treat the water before adding it to the tank, then of course you can use less.

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My tap water has 20-30ppm. Do you use RO or other water? How do you keep the nitrates from rising?

Cut with RO, select plants, nitrate reactor, frequent water changes to keep nitrates below 80ppm. All are options. 30ppm isn't terribly high, and nothing that most fish can't adapt to. It would make new additions require a slower acclamation, though.

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My tap water has 20-30ppm. Do you use RO or other water? How do you keep the nitrates from rising?

Unfortunately right now I'm relegated to buying saltwater from the LFS.
Working on ways to "clean-up" my tap water without the expense of an RO/DI unit.
Going to build a de-nitrifying filter as well.
 
No, if you are adding untreated tap water directly to the tank you need to treat for the full volume of the tank.

If you treat the water before adding it to the tank, then of course you can use less.

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I'm curious as to why you would have to dechlorinate the whole tank when you are only replacing half of the water. Sure, if you add chlorinated water all the tank water will be "chlorinated" but it will be only half as concentrated. The actual amount of chlorine stays the same, so the amount of conditioner needed stays the same as well.
 
I'm curious as to why you would have to dechlorinate the whole tank when you are only replacing half of the water. Sure, if you add chlorinated water all the tank water will be "chlorinated" but it will be only half as concentrated. The actual amount of chlorine stays the same, so the amount of conditioner needed stays the same as well.

because of dispersion in the larger volume of water.
 
Please let me know how you do this. RO water is expensive and heavy to lug around. My LFS store uses 5 gal containers and I would rather use tap water but need to get them down. Every water change puts 20-30ppm of nitrates back into the tank. I would be very interested if you can find something to help your situation.
 
Is it just me or am I the only one that noticed that the test was done with strips?
Neontetra, test strips are known to be quite inaccurate you may want to look into an api master test kit and chuck the strips.

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Please let me know how you do this. RO water is expensive and heavy to lug around. My LFS store uses 5 gal containers and I would rather use tap water but need to get them down. Every water change puts 20-30ppm of nitrates back into the tank. I would be very interested if you can find something to help your situation.

One of the natural food markets near me has an RO machine and they sell it for .50 a gallon. But I think most people have RO units on their tap. Also, look for "drinking water" Mar the distilled water, it's filtered by RO and it's usually near .80 a gallon. Long term? Get an RO unit and it will pay for itsself.

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I'm curious as to why you would have to dechlorinate the whole tank when you are only replacing half of the water. Sure, if you add chlorinated water all the tank water will be "chlorinated" but it will be only half as concentrated. The actual amount of chlorine stays the same, so the amount of conditioner needed stays the same as well.

It's also what the instructions on the back of the Prime bottle say. Benign overkill is a pretty solid policy when adding non-volatile toxins directly to your tank.
 
Never mind, miss read something and thought OP was using easybalance plus has a water conditioner.

The tank being on a table with unsupported corners concerns me though.
 
I'm curious as to why you would have to dechlorinate the whole tank when you are only replacing half of the water. Sure, if you add chlorinated water all the tank water will be "chlorinated" but it will be only half as concentrated. The actual amount of chlorine stays the same, so the amount of conditioner needed stays the same as well.

Because the dechlorinator needs to be at a certain concentration in the water to be effective.

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