nitrites on the rise

[hounddogg68]

ok here is the problem,,,everything was good in the tank except nitrates,did the water change it was starting to come down some but now my nitrites are way up,,55 gallon tank and 20 gallon water change,cleaned filter and bio,,also went through sand in the bottom to clean some of the stuff up,,ive put prime in to hopefully neutralize the nitrates and nitrites,,,,did me going through the sand bed do this,,ive got about 400$ worth or inverts and fish that i ordered from swf waiting to go in,please help

 

[mrmaroon]

Was there anything i your tank before you cleaned it? Was it completely cycled? DO you have lIve ROck? ANd why did you order so much stuff to put in at once?

 

[josh]

Hound:
Don't upset the substrate or the filter as this is where the vital bacteria live. Just do more water changes until the levels go back down. Since you upset the bacteria you might have a problem converting the waste in the future. I would see if a LFS could take the coral till you get things back under control, I am sure they would help you out. It could have been lots of things, more than likely just overfeeding or just a natural occurance brought by an algae bloom, check your phos levels. What type of cleanup crew do you have?

 

[hounddogg68]

actually i didnt order that much ,i got a nice cleanup crew and a small reef package,,,,ive got 40 lbs of live rock,,tank has been going for a year now,,always have had trouble with nitrates,,had a bio filter and removed the bio balls ,bought carbon packs to put in it,,everything just seemed to go haywire when we went through the sand,,,tommorrow we will be getting live sand to go with the 2 inches of greean sand we have on bottom now fish seem to be doing ok but i guess i will wait it out

 

[josh]

If you are adding more sand chances are you will spike things again, just do water changes, use a poly filter and carbon and just wait it out.

 

[hounddogg68]

hey,,thanks josh,,we will slowly add the live sand and just hope for the best,everything is slowly getting back to normal,my wife has a bad hadit of arranging the rocks in the tank so once she sees this maybe she wont anymore,,thanks for your help

 

[jlem]

I would put the bioballs back in. they will produce no more nitrat than the live rock, and they are great for ammonia and nitrite. put a prefilter to trap debree before it can get trapped in the bioballs. You can mix up the very top of the sand without hurting anything, just mix the very top half inch at the most to get debree to the prefilter to be removed when you do water changer.

 

[hounddogg68]

thanks alot ill try that,,any help at all will help,,,for a year now i havent had a live sand bed as soon as i put sand in about 2 hours later started seeing worms crawling through the sand,,,the clean up crew looks to be doing good so far,,just trying to nuetralize everything till they go down some,,useing prime