cleaning my nano cube

[reelsteel]

I've had my nano cube (12 gallon)up and running for 6 weeks now. I have 7 lbs of live rock and 20 lbs of crushed coral. I am running the filtering system that came with it(sponges, ceramic tubes, and bio-balls). This is my first salt water tank, so bare with me if I say things wrong.
I have a small clown and a small green chromis. I have a clean up crew of about 7 tiny blue hermit crabs, 5 small scarlet crabs, 2 emerald crabs and 4 turbo snails. I had alot of brown algae at about 1 week in and that's when I go the clean up crew(they cleaned it up great). I've had the green chromis for 9 days and the clown for 5 days. Everything seems to be fine, except my Nitrates are around 20 - 30 and my ammonia is between 0 - .25 My nitrites are 0, my ph is 7.8 - 8.0
When I got the clean up crew, it had a peppermint shrimp and a sally lightfoot crab, they both died within 4 days, my ammonia spiked to 2.0, so I did a 3 gallon water change and it seemed to settle at .25 and never lower(I have used the drops method and the stick method to test my ammonia).
So my question after all that is, how do I lower my nirates and ammonia. Also how do I clean the filtering system? Can I rinse the sponges and bio-balls with water from my sink? If I can how often should I clean them and is a gallon water change every other day too much?
Thanks

 

[kimc]

I'm new at this too... from what I have been told DO NOT rinse Bio Balls. I think its ok to rinse sponges. Good luck!!

 

[bona42na]

From what Ive heard and read it might be the bio-balls. I never used them in my Nanocube.Instead I used some live rock rubble and cycled with that . What you may have to do is slowly replace a few balls at a time with L/R that is already cycled eventually getting all the B/B out. This according to my local guy who I do respect his opinion. HTH

 

[moraym]

Sounds right, you definitely want to slowly convert from bio-balls to a LR filtration in the sump.
The amount of your water change, and the frequency of that change, will depend on your tank specs. As you move away from bio-balls into LR filtration, you should be able to go a week or two between water changes, probably settling on a weekly change. Not sure for now though, depends on the flucuations in your water parameters.

 

[nudibranch]

Yes, definately remove the bio balls and replace w/ LR.
Also...if you actually have crushed coral and not aragonite sand in there you might want to consider changing that. Generally because of the size, CC tends to create a lot of pockets where left over food etc. collects which will also spike Nitrates. Because its a new tank this probably isn't the current reason for your spike but it's something to consider.