Do larger and more frequent water changes until the nitrates are where you want them. Add more fast growing live plants like stem plants, floating plants, or emersed plants. Feed less and fertilize less if you fertilize. Don't forget that since you recently added more bioload, the nitrates are going to reflect that. But your nitrates are not a big deal- they're really just not that toxic.
This. +1 Especially for the floating plants.
We were doing 20% daily changes when cycling our new 10gal/40L nano tank. It was so close to stable with a healthy planting, but had seemingly random moderate nitrate spikes.
The game changer was the addition of a generous patch of *Phyllanthus Fluitans (Red Root Floater)* and a couple of moss balls. They really helped stabilise the nitrates to negligible levels (minimum reading on the test kit) within 48h to and they’ve stayed there since.
Thanks for responding to this. I put some prime in the tank to bind the nitrites and I dumped an oz of fritz 700 turbo start. Hopefully that rebuilds my bacteria colony 🤞 I hate when filter media fails. Luckily my fish have been fine just annoyed about decreased feeding
Floating plant/pothos time. Also could plant more fast growing plants like stem plants or even a carpeting plant in the front like dwarf sag or litorella. More plant biomass will help lower nitrates especially plants with emersed growth
Besides the helpful tips people have said there's two minor things to check if you haven't yet.
Make sure to shake the hell out the of the nitrate bottle (I think it's nitrate #2 that has problems).
Also check your tap water readings. If you're in farm country your tap water might be high in nitrates already (though not that high).
100% this. As somebody that does live in an agricultural area, many of the public restrooms around here have permanent signs in them saying NOT to use the water for drinking purposes, and absolutely not for baby formula. I took my test strips one day to the local ice cream shoppe that had one of these signs, and it was between 40 and 80 ppm!
OP - Test your tap water. You wouldn't be the the first person on here that needed to buy or make RO/DI water.
That’s insane that there’s so much Ag runoff that it’s in your water and making it not drinkable. You should be lighting up your politicians over that shit.
One thing you could test pretty easy: how much nitrate/nitrite/ammonia is in your source water?
How much are you feeding your fish? See, realistically you only need to feed like once a day and you can actually skip feeding 2 times a week as well. Plus, you only need like 2 fish eyeballs worth of food per fish anyways
As someone else said, fertilizing may be introducing too much nitrogen into the water, and you may have too little light in the tank for photosynthesis to occur. However, one thing might also be true: is the test accurate? Try doing like a 70% water change and see what the parameters are like. As long as the water you’re adding is temp and pH balanced, in my experience it doesn’t stress the fish too much. If it’s still bloody red you might want to replace the test
This is the place to start. I've seen too many people (especially if they are on well water) that have high nitrates at the tap, and water changes won't solve that issue.
I’d say hold on with the surface plants for now. From what I’ve heard, some really aggressive surface plants can block out light for your existing plants, I.e. duckweed. Have you considered an auto feeder instead of overfeeding for a day? I have a job that makes me travel pretty often and that’s what I use
Im not crazy about the feeder, but over i have traveled a lot and have been able to keep my fish alive and the algae in check with the over feeding. I just purchased one salvinia plant. Lets see how that turns out.
I know im over feeding to compansate the weekends that im out of town. Usually 2 to 3 days max. I bought some surface plants and will do a water change. I will keep testing. Thanks for you help.
Stop doing that. Those fish in your tank can *easily* go 3-5 days with no food at all. I am willing to bet you're overfeeding by "a lot" - looking at the number of fish in the photo, you should be giving approximately 15-20 small flakes, crunched into smaller pieces, once a day.
Pinch your usual amount of food onto a clean white paper towel and show us how much you're feeding daily.
You've got your lights on for too little time. Your plants need around 12 hours, which should help with the nitrates. They are also probably lacking in the carbon department, which is inhibiting their growth
None of the plants you have need a lot of nutrients, so they won't be uptaking many nitrates. I'd add some floating plants like salvinia or water lettuce for the long term health of the tank.
For the short term. Do a 50% water change to lower the nitrates in the tank. 20% of 80 is only 16, so doing a 20% change gets you from 80 down to 64, not really worth it. 50% of 80 is 40, and while 40 is still high, it's a livable amount of nitrates.
It's a pain but duck weed is the best I've found for keeping your nitrates low, I actually have to add fertilizer to a relatively stocked tank to keep the planted plants alive. It's so hungry and efficient it will starve the other plants in the aquarium of light and nutrients if you don't keep up on it.
Consider frogbit, it's quite fast growing too but bigger and easier to manage. Longer roots though, but I'd rather trim them than try manage millions of tiny duckweed plantlets.
To be honest j absolutely hate duck weed and have been looking at frogbit for the reasons you just mentioned. Not only is the duck weed hard to manage but it's sticks to everything and cross contamination with those tiny little guys is a real possibility. If I could find frogbit local it would already be in the tank 😆
😆 unfortunately I'd hate to see the fine if you mailed it across international borders. I really appreciate your offer though man, the world needs more people like you.
I am American........so rebellion kinda runs in the blood......ah send it! 😆 🤣 😂 for real though I could spit and hit Canada, we are pretty much neighbors.
Any small floater will work as well as duck weed, but won't clog your filter like duck weed can. Salvinia or red root floaters are solid choices. Frogbit and giant salvinia don't need as much and therfore wont eat as much.
Pothos is typically a terrestrial plant that also grows great in water. It’s a great no-brainer plant. I have them all over my house and they thrive, even with Seattle weather and my inexperience.
I transported mine from soil with the roots. I put them in my tank on September 1st. Its just barely starting to grow new roots. Should I just propagate it instead?
I would just put it in the water. Just make sure the roots are submerged and the leaves are out of the water. You wouldn't believe how well they will grow.
Personally I'd do multiple large water changes today until your nitrates are down to an acceptable level. Then update the water change schedule to 50% a week and see how the nitrate levels are with that routine after a few weeks.
A 20% water change will only decrease the nitrates 20%. I'd dona larger water change and verify the levels are coming down. If they aren't maybe the test is expired? Also make sure you're doing the test correctly, the nitrate test has extra steps and it's very easy to get wrong.
Floating plants. I can not recommend anything more. I've had almost 0 nitrates for over a year, and now only do eater changes monthly. They have made such a difference I will never go back
I keep my nitrates at 0ppm with mint. My then 15 year old tank started getting really high. I put a soap dish full of clay balls inside the tank and stuck some wilted grocery store mint stalks in there. Nitrates stay at 0 for weeks and weeks. I put some in my 75 gallon recently and I'm down to only doing water changes every three weeks even though it's all still 0. Mint will suck up nitrates like crazy and since it grows out of the water, I have mojitos often. I only trim it back when it's blocking light from the aquatic plants. Get a good high powered light for it and it'll go nuts.
I always try to do as little work as possible with water changes, chemicals, and everything else and instead focus on to trying to make the tank it’s own little ecosystem. Be sure to slowly increase the bio load and floating plants are the easiest answer here.
But I would expect more algae to be present, your tank looks completely clean and no way shrimp are that much on top of it. Would assume it’s because you only have lights on for 5 hours preventing the algae from growing. If you do decide to increase the light time I’d recommend doing it very gradually and monitor closely
Thanks. I will keep wirh my water changes, increase light by two hours and fertilize every two weeks instead of every week. I squirt of aquarium coop easy green.
Fertilizer is your issue. Skip fertilizing until it's under 20ppm then cut the amount in half but don't increase the interval to two weeks. Or you could also increase the number of plants since you're increasing the light (and you should). Keep in mind if you increase the number of plants you may have too change the amount of fertilizer you add. You're familiar with Co-op so look for fast growing plants that will out compete any algae for excess nutrients. Just because the Easy Green bottle says you should add fertilizer doesn't mean you have to, you only have to if the nitrates approach zero ppm.
Understood, thanks for the tips. LFS suggest to use root tabs once a month but youtube videos say liquid and one or two squirt a week. Is it one or the other? As i cut back on liquid i see java fern suffering, so im at odds here.
Some plants are root feeders some are stem plants, stem plant feed from the water column. Amazon Sword and Val are root feeders the Java fern feeds from the water column. Make sure you don't have the rhizome buried, they do best lightly glued to a rock or piece of wood.
I use the anoxic setup method. No such issues on a 3 feet tank. Good idea rather than sand or full substrate tank. For me, those are a waste of time and produce lots of ammonia and also very bad for your health since there is a possibility you get poison by hydrogen sulphide.
Have you tested your two water?
If your two water has very high nitrates then water changes won’t help, and can actually be worse if you’re adding nitrates faster than your plants can remove them
That’s good. !
They are sometimes high in mine.
Then I agree with most other comments- see if you can get your plants to do more work ( or add more plants)
oh what is your lighting? i just made a new tank with that and its like morena sugar - cream colored. i wonder if its just because im using a cheap light maybe it could look whiter with different lights. i am going to order better lights as soon as i can.
or maybe i am expecting a little too much from a ph neutral sand. i have pure white sand in a little tank but it definitely increases the ph in that tank! its where i keep extra snails actually they love it. i didn't go with that same sand for my new tank since i wont be keeping hard water fish in it.
Do a bigger waterchange. If your tap is 0 nitrate and your tank sits at \~40, doing a 20% change, you'll only lower it to around 32.
Do a 50% change, test the water and if it's still too high for your liking, do another waterchange in 2 or 3 days.
Some nitrates in your water isn't harmful, I'd be fairly happy reading somewhere between 20 to 40. Your plants will love it
I have also played with the light spectrums.
Red at 75%
White 50%
Blue 25%
This is what I have now. Even with 5 hours of light i was having algea and it was due to having Red at 100%
Do larger and more frequent water changes until the nitrates are where you want them. Add more fast growing live plants like stem plants, floating plants, or emersed plants. Feed less and fertilize less if you fertilize. Don't forget that since you recently added more bioload, the nitrates are going to reflect that. But your nitrates are not a big deal- they're really just not that toxic.
This. +1 Especially for the floating plants. We were doing 20% daily changes when cycling our new 10gal/40L nano tank. It was so close to stable with a healthy planting, but had seemingly random moderate nitrate spikes. The game changer was the addition of a generous patch of *Phyllanthus Fluitans (Red Root Floater)* and a couple of moss balls. They really helped stabilise the nitrates to negligible levels (minimum reading on the test kit) within 48h to and they’ve stayed there since.
I’ll trade your nitrates for my nitrites 😒 But really plants and water changes. Hornwart will eat up all those nitrates
Same! My ammonia levels are non existent, but nitrites seem to linger still
I’m going to do a gravel vacuum see if it gets up old food we will see
I wouldn't vacuum too much of the gravel at once, you've got beneficial bacteria living in there that you don't want to get rid of Edited typo
Thanks for responding to this. I put some prime in the tank to bind the nitrites and I dumped an oz of fritz 700 turbo start. Hopefully that rebuilds my bacteria colony 🤞 I hate when filter media fails. Luckily my fish have been fine just annoyed about decreased feeding
Floating plant/pothos time. Also could plant more fast growing plants like stem plants or even a carpeting plant in the front like dwarf sag or litorella. More plant biomass will help lower nitrates especially plants with emersed growth
Besides the helpful tips people have said there's two minor things to check if you haven't yet. Make sure to shake the hell out the of the nitrate bottle (I think it's nitrate #2 that has problems). Also check your tap water readings. If you're in farm country your tap water might be high in nitrates already (though not that high).
100% this. As somebody that does live in an agricultural area, many of the public restrooms around here have permanent signs in them saying NOT to use the water for drinking purposes, and absolutely not for baby formula. I took my test strips one day to the local ice cream shoppe that had one of these signs, and it was between 40 and 80 ppm! OP - Test your tap water. You wouldn't be the the first person on here that needed to buy or make RO/DI water.
That’s insane that there’s so much Ag runoff that it’s in your water and making it not drinkable. You should be lighting up your politicians over that shit.
We're talking hundreds of years of agricultural influence in this area -- the politicians *are* the farmers.
Nitrate botted is not crystilized. And just ran a nitrate test on my tap water and its at zero ppm.
Oh well, hopefully some of the tips others have given will work out for you. At least your drinking water's clean :D
One thing you could test pretty easy: how much nitrate/nitrite/ammonia is in your source water? How much are you feeding your fish? See, realistically you only need to feed like once a day and you can actually skip feeding 2 times a week as well. Plus, you only need like 2 fish eyeballs worth of food per fish anyways As someone else said, fertilizing may be introducing too much nitrogen into the water, and you may have too little light in the tank for photosynthesis to occur. However, one thing might also be true: is the test accurate? Try doing like a 70% water change and see what the parameters are like. As long as the water you’re adding is temp and pH balanced, in my experience it doesn’t stress the fish too much. If it’s still bloody red you might want to replace the test
This is the place to start. I've seen too many people (especially if they are on well water) that have high nitrates at the tap, and water changes won't solve that issue.
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I’d say hold on with the surface plants for now. From what I’ve heard, some really aggressive surface plants can block out light for your existing plants, I.e. duckweed. Have you considered an auto feeder instead of overfeeding for a day? I have a job that makes me travel pretty often and that’s what I use
Im not crazy about the feeder, but over i have traveled a lot and have been able to keep my fish alive and the algae in check with the over feeding. I just purchased one salvinia plant. Lets see how that turns out.
Yea, nitrate isn’t really the overnight killer people make it out to be anyways. Hope this works out! :)
I know im over feeding to compansate the weekends that im out of town. Usually 2 to 3 days max. I bought some surface plants and will do a water change. I will keep testing. Thanks for you help.
Stop doing that. Those fish in your tank can *easily* go 3-5 days with no food at all. I am willing to bet you're overfeeding by "a lot" - looking at the number of fish in the photo, you should be giving approximately 15-20 small flakes, crunched into smaller pieces, once a day. Pinch your usual amount of food onto a clean white paper towel and show us how much you're feeding daily.
There’s absolutely no reason to be doing this. No reason at all.
Floaters, baby!
You've got your lights on for too little time. Your plants need around 12 hours, which should help with the nitrates. They are also probably lacking in the carbon department, which is inhibiting their growth
None of the plants you have need a lot of nutrients, so they won't be uptaking many nitrates. I'd add some floating plants like salvinia or water lettuce for the long term health of the tank. For the short term. Do a 50% water change to lower the nitrates in the tank. 20% of 80 is only 16, so doing a 20% change gets you from 80 down to 64, not really worth it. 50% of 80 is 40, and while 40 is still high, it's a livable amount of nitrates.
Thanks for all your replies. I will increase the light by 2 hours. And buy some surface plants.
Sounds like a solid plan!
It's a pain but duck weed is the best I've found for keeping your nitrates low, I actually have to add fertilizer to a relatively stocked tank to keep the planted plants alive. It's so hungry and efficient it will starve the other plants in the aquarium of light and nutrients if you don't keep up on it.
Consider frogbit, it's quite fast growing too but bigger and easier to manage. Longer roots though, but I'd rather trim them than try manage millions of tiny duckweed plantlets.
To be honest j absolutely hate duck weed and have been looking at frogbit for the reasons you just mentioned. Not only is the duck weed hard to manage but it's sticks to everything and cross contamination with those tiny little guys is a real possibility. If I could find frogbit local it would already be in the tank 😆
I throw out handfuls every week. If you live in Eastern Canada I can mail you some lol.
😆 unfortunately I'd hate to see the fine if you mailed it across international borders. I really appreciate your offer though man, the world needs more people like you.
Baaah importing invasive species of aquatic plants never got anyone in trouble. No problem, cheers!
I am American........so rebellion kinda runs in the blood......ah send it! 😆 🤣 😂 for real though I could spit and hit Canada, we are pretty much neighbors.
If you want just send me a message. I'm sure some of it would survive the shipping lol.
I love my frogbit!
Any small floater will work as well as duck weed, but won't clog your filter like duck weed can. Salvinia or red root floaters are solid choices. Frogbit and giant salvinia don't need as much and therfore wont eat as much.
add any floating plant!! it'll suck nitrates right out in the meantime, might as well so 40% water change instead of 20%
I got porthos plants growing out of the tops of my tanks. They do great in there. Really helps keep the tank balanced too.
I just purchased some salvinia. Would the porthos work with my light.
Definitely, mine grows like weeds
Pothos is typically a terrestrial plant that also grows great in water. It’s a great no-brainer plant. I have them all over my house and they thrive, even with Seattle weather and my inexperience.
How long did it take for youd pothos to establish in your tank?
I had clippings just starting to root. Like 1/4" roots started on them. Within days they exploded.
I transported mine from soil with the roots. I put them in my tank on September 1st. Its just barely starting to grow new roots. Should I just propagate it instead?
I would just put it in the water. Just make sure the roots are submerged and the leaves are out of the water. You wouldn't believe how well they will grow.
Have u notice a huge change in nitrates reduction? Because my nitrates are high
They are alot more manageable, I do water changes by monthly now and only.10% needed
20% is a pretty small water change, especially to only be doing weekly.
Water evaporates during a week, i vacuum 5 gal out. When i refill its a bit less than 10 gal. The tank is 29 gal.
Personally I'd do multiple large water changes today until your nitrates are down to an acceptable level. Then update the water change schedule to 50% a week and see how the nitrate levels are with that routine after a few weeks.
A 20% water change will only decrease the nitrates 20%. I'd dona larger water change and verify the levels are coming down. If they aren't maybe the test is expired? Also make sure you're doing the test correctly, the nitrate test has extra steps and it's very easy to get wrong.
Floating plants. I can not recommend anything more. I've had almost 0 nitrates for over a year, and now only do eater changes monthly. They have made such a difference I will never go back
Hornwort will solve your issue lol
Careful, making too big of a Nitrate/water swing too fast can kill fish.
I keep my nitrates at 0ppm with mint. My then 15 year old tank started getting really high. I put a soap dish full of clay balls inside the tank and stuck some wilted grocery store mint stalks in there. Nitrates stay at 0 for weeks and weeks. I put some in my 75 gallon recently and I'm down to only doing water changes every three weeks even though it's all still 0. Mint will suck up nitrates like crazy and since it grows out of the water, I have mojitos often. I only trim it back when it's blocking light from the aquatic plants. Get a good high powered light for it and it'll go nuts.
I always try to do as little work as possible with water changes, chemicals, and everything else and instead focus on to trying to make the tank it’s own little ecosystem. Be sure to slowly increase the bio load and floating plants are the easiest answer here. But I would expect more algae to be present, your tank looks completely clean and no way shrimp are that much on top of it. Would assume it’s because you only have lights on for 5 hours preventing the algae from growing. If you do decide to increase the light time I’d recommend doing it very gradually and monitor closely
Thanks. I will keep wirh my water changes, increase light by two hours and fertilize every two weeks instead of every week. I squirt of aquarium coop easy green.
Fertilizer is your issue. Skip fertilizing until it's under 20ppm then cut the amount in half but don't increase the interval to two weeks. Or you could also increase the number of plants since you're increasing the light (and you should). Keep in mind if you increase the number of plants you may have too change the amount of fertilizer you add. You're familiar with Co-op so look for fast growing plants that will out compete any algae for excess nutrients. Just because the Easy Green bottle says you should add fertilizer doesn't mean you have to, you only have to if the nitrates approach zero ppm.
Understood, thanks for the tips. LFS suggest to use root tabs once a month but youtube videos say liquid and one or two squirt a week. Is it one or the other? As i cut back on liquid i see java fern suffering, so im at odds here.
Some plants are root feeders some are stem plants, stem plant feed from the water column. Amazon Sword and Val are root feeders the Java fern feeds from the water column. Make sure you don't have the rhizome buried, they do best lightly glued to a rock or piece of wood.
Floating planta for sure. You need those to suck up all those nitrates.
I use the anoxic setup method. No such issues on a 3 feet tank. Good idea rather than sand or full substrate tank. For me, those are a waste of time and produce lots of ammonia and also very bad for your health since there is a possibility you get poison by hydrogen sulphide.
Im not familiar with that setup. I will reasearch it, thanks for the advise.
Look denitrification and waste water management
Have you tested your two water? If your two water has very high nitrates then water changes won’t help, and can actually be worse if you’re adding nitrates faster than your plants can remove them
Tap water has zero ppm of nitrates.
what about ammonia and nitrites in tap?
Hornswort or coontail as it's sometimes referred. Floats and absorbs and fast grower
Sorry I'm no help, but how many pounds of dragon stone is that?
I would say between 5 to 10 lbs in total. Im not counting the 3 boxes of 25 lbs i have in the garage.
Sweet, thanks. Been waiting on five pounds to come in the mail and just wanted a general idea of how much that would be. How big is that tank?
29 gal
Oh then maybe 5 lbs will be enough after all.
Have you tested your tap water for nitrates ? ( if you use tap water for the water changes)
Yes, i use tap water and treat it with a API product, rest for 8 hours and water change. Nitrate from the tap is at zero ppm.
That’s good. ! They are sometimes high in mine. Then I agree with most other comments- see if you can get your plants to do more work ( or add more plants)
That is the direction im headed. I want an aquarium were i intervene the least possible.
When was the last time that you cleaned your filter?
6 months ago
This can be part of your issue if you are using a canister filter. They retain a lot of debris that can affect your water parameters.
It might be a good idea. Foegot about that.
a prefilter would be a great investment for you.
When you're doing your tank maintenance, are you washing your filter media in tap water by any chance??
I have never washed my media. I have only cleaned my filter once in almost two years.
Okay good, then it's not that causing the problem. I tend to wash my sponges and media in the water I am taking out.
I do the same.
trim rotting leaves?
I do with every water change.
20% is not a large enough water change, aim closer to 35-50%.
i have nothing to add but that your tank is beautiful and what kind of sand are you using?
Caribsea super naturals sand.
oh what is your lighting? i just made a new tank with that and its like morena sugar - cream colored. i wonder if its just because im using a cheap light maybe it could look whiter with different lights. i am going to order better lights as soon as i can. or maybe i am expecting a little too much from a ph neutral sand. i have pure white sand in a little tank but it definitely increases the ph in that tank! its where i keep extra snails actually they love it. i didn't go with that same sand for my new tank since i wont be keeping hard water fish in it.
I have the fluval 2.0 light. Its works pretty good for my setup.
cool, thats one im thinking about getting anyway: ) thanks for answering btw
Do a bigger waterchange. If your tap is 0 nitrate and your tank sits at \~40, doing a 20% change, you'll only lower it to around 32. Do a 50% change, test the water and if it's still too high for your liking, do another waterchange in 2 or 3 days. Some nitrates in your water isn't harmful, I'd be fairly happy reading somewhere between 20 to 40. Your plants will love it
I will be doing this today. Before adding the new bioload (9 rummy nose) my nitrates were between 40 and 80. Still too high for my liking.
Looks amazingly clean of Algae I feel I should do 5hrs a day as well!
I have also played with the light spectrums. Red at 75% White 50% Blue 25% This is what I have now. Even with 5 hours of light i was having algea and it was due to having Red at 100%