Hello all, we have just joined the forum and this will be our first post. We are newbies to marine aquariums and acquired our first system a week ago. We have a question about our nitrate levels but need to give some system details and background first...
We bought it second hand and here are some of the details:
It's a 4ft tank with a 4ft sump, it has a trickle filter and in the sump there is a protein skimmer and some crushed coral and sand. In the display tank there is a small amount of LR with a bunch of other various rocks (not 100% sure what it all is). There are also 3 powerheads but not sure what the output is. Anyway, when we bought it had one very old T8 light which was hardly lighting anything so yesterday we bought 2 T5 HO, 53W lights with reflectors.
The tank came with 2 clowns, 5 moonies, a blue star and we have since added a few hermies and nerita. To be honest we think this was all the previous owner was able to keep alive as he had no water tests and the tank looked like a green algae farm. He admitted to killing a lot of stuff during the 1 1/2yrs that he had it.
Here are the water details:
Temp - 27C
Salinity - 1.022 - 1.023
pH - 8
ammonia - less than 0.25mg/L
However we are concerned about the nitrate (have a look at the photo). When we collected the tank from him, we asked him how often he cleaned the trickle filter and he said never. When we did a nitrate test a few days ago we thought it was higher we would like and thought that the source may be coming from the extremely brown filter floss in the trickle filter. So we changed the floss but didn't touch the bioballs as we didn't want to disturb things too much. However, 2 days later the nitrate levels have still not decreased. Should we be concerned about this at the moment? We understand that the system has gone through a lot of changes in the last week and were not sure whether to leave things to adjust or whether a partial water change was needed? All the fish and other creatures look happy and are feeding well. Any advise would be much appreciated.
We bought it second hand and here are some of the details:
It's a 4ft tank with a 4ft sump, it has a trickle filter and in the sump there is a protein skimmer and some crushed coral and sand. In the display tank there is a small amount of LR with a bunch of other various rocks (not 100% sure what it all is). There are also 3 powerheads but not sure what the output is. Anyway, when we bought it had one very old T8 light which was hardly lighting anything so yesterday we bought 2 T5 HO, 53W lights with reflectors.
The tank came with 2 clowns, 5 moonies, a blue star and we have since added a few hermies and nerita. To be honest we think this was all the previous owner was able to keep alive as he had no water tests and the tank looked like a green algae farm. He admitted to killing a lot of stuff during the 1 1/2yrs that he had it.
Here are the water details:
Temp - 27C
Salinity - 1.022 - 1.023
pH - 8
ammonia - less than 0.25mg/L
However we are concerned about the nitrate (have a look at the photo). When we collected the tank from him, we asked him how often he cleaned the trickle filter and he said never. When we did a nitrate test a few days ago we thought it was higher we would like and thought that the source may be coming from the extremely brown filter floss in the trickle filter. So we changed the floss but didn't touch the bioballs as we didn't want to disturb things too much. However, 2 days later the nitrate levels have still not decreased. Should we be concerned about this at the moment? We understand that the system has gone through a lot of changes in the last week and were not sure whether to leave things to adjust or whether a partial water change was needed? All the fish and other creatures look happy and are feeding well. Any advise would be much appreciated.
