Nitrate Levels

[Ali]

I moved in a new tank yesterday, and am tracking water parameters like a hawk to make sure it doesn't crash. Even though the canisters were unplugged for hours the ammonia and nitrite are quite low, but my tank that was 75% new water yesterday already has nitrates over 40ppm. The tank is not overstocked, and there is a good amount of plants in there too.

Is this normal?

 

[pbmax]

If you're using cycled filters and/or substrate from another cycled tank and/or lots of plants that could easily happen, depending on the bio load (including substrate, fish, gunk in the filters, etc.).

 

[Cory]

Doesn't sound normal to have nitrate that high, unless you have nitrate in your tap water, or your nitrates were really high before moving the tank.

 

[Ali]

I tested my tap and it came out at 10 pmm. I'll test again with water that sat out a bit. Also don't know what the nitrate was when I got the tank, maybe it was super high.

Did a big round of water changes on all tanks tonight. (Took until 4am because the powerhead I usually use to pump fresh water into tanks from a bucket on the ground decided to die on me, and I had to dump all 100 gals by hand. Gah!)

I will check tomorrow and make sure it is staying low. If I do have nitrates in my tap is there anything I can do about it?

 

[pbmax]

You can purchase a reverse osmosis system - that will remove the nitrates. Unfortunately they operate very slowly and so you'll have to have some sort of storage mechanism for the water amounts necessary to for tank changes. You'll also have to add hardness back into the water before changes as RO removes just about everything (products like seachem equilibrium and alkaline buffer or baking soda).

 

[Cory]

Well in theory if you had 10ppm in your tap water. The lowest you can get your tanks is 10ppm. Which isn't the worst ever, Just run planted tanks and do slightly more frequent changes and you'd be fine. If you had a 30g tank, that got to 0 from plants, once you did a 33% water change, you'd only be introducing 3ppm of nitrate, which the plants would consume again.

 

[pbmax]

Yup - lots of plants is the answer Floating plants can be great for water treatment in a pinch - no CO2 limitation so growth and thus nutrient uptake is not as constrained.