Mobile Bay Reef Keepers

My tank always seems to have high nitrates. Any ideas on this. No I dont do water changes but when I did it was only a temporary fix. Think I feed too much ? What do you guys feed and how often ?

I would say overfeeding is a good reason.

I only feed phyto and flake. But of course I have no idea what my trates are. I don't have blooms so I don't sweat it. Of course I do WCs every week.

I had this problem too last summer and it got steadily worse. The nitrate level finally topped out at well over 100ppm on the salifert test. The culpret...........over feeding. I went from feeding 2 times per day to feeding about 2x per week. We did a bunch of water changes and the level eventually went down to about 5ppm. In the meantime. the hair algae took over and to this day I have not been able to get rid of it. Want to know how to ruin a beautiful display tank............

Elizabeth

yeah i thought so too, Oh Elizabeth you can get rid of that hair algae pretty easy.

1) cut back on photo time
2) remove source of problem (nitrates)
3) Emerald crabs and assorted hermits
4) remove what you can by hand

she has a ton of emeralds, scrubed the rock, feed only 2 times a week, and still has algae...her stuff is rough...i think you need to burn the rock...like the gorilla crab..hehe

I had my problems with hair algae and it still hasn't gone away. I had no measurable amounts of trites or trates though. I fed the fish about twice a week and have a fuge with macro growing. Tested for phosphate and silicate and couldn't find any. My RO water tested perfect. I even took out the rocks a scrubbed them with a toothbrush and washed them in fresh water. Still had problems. The algae is finally going away but it took a few bulb changes and all that other crap. It does not want to give up in the high current areas. Had a bi-color blenny which kept it in check for the most part but had to remove it when he started eating my Acros so Brandon has it now. My emeralds never really touched it but ate some of my nice red macro that was growing in a little patch(that kind of pissed me off) and the blue leg and red leg hermits don't seem to bother with it too much either. I'll just keep plucking those problem areas.

Yea I took all the rock out, and scrubbed it with a wire brush and rinsed it. Within 2 days it was back and then some. We bought the emerald crabs, etc and have also put some urchins back in (thanks mike!). The algae really took off after we removed the last ones we had.

The other say we hooked up the uv to the 100 as a last ditch ffort to keep the pores under control.

We'll see!

Elizabeth

What about your skimmer ? Is there one and is it really producing anything ?