RobRocksFishTank
Moved On
goldfinger said:You will find the Nitrates climb pretty fast if you have cycled well and @ 120gallons good luck with stocking containers to get rid of nearly 60% of water just to get rid of the Nitrate at a safe level, unless you have some chemical media to deal with it!
If you go down the route of fish in just remember high Nitrates are just as bad as the rest, but there is no bacteria to remove the Nitrate its all chemcial at that point. Unless you have a decent planted tank to soak up some of the Nitrate.
Soon as the tank has cycled stick some plants fella in there mate it will defo help with any chemcial spikes from stocking aswell.
I think you are mistaken about the Nitrates getting out of control. That is unless I overstock or neglect the tank. They will go up in direct proportion to the amount of waste being produced. With a light biioload, I would expect them to go up much slower than a fully stoked tank. It's been a while but I have kept many fish tanks and partial water changes, 25-30%, once a month kept them under control. I see a lot of people here suggesting much more often, but I have my doubts of the need for that kind of frequency, Only time will tell, but since I simply cannot afford to stock the tank even close to capacity, the bioload is going to be so small that if conditions go crazy on me, there is going to be something else going on other than the normal course of things.
Buckets for a 120 gal.? Are you kidding? The last time I needed a bucket for a water change on a large tank, I used it multiple times. No need for multiple buckets.
TwoTankAmin said:To encourage denitrification requires one of several potential solutions. Well planted tanks with good root systems works well. they combine denitrifying bacteria in the substrate with the ability of plants to uptake nitrate itself. Another method is to use special media designed to encourage to colonization of the denitrifying bacteria deep inside the media. Finally, ine can set up a filter especially for encouraging denitrifyers to colonize and creating the conditions they need to thrive. This requires the use of both specifically designed media combined with a much slower flow rate than we typically use in our filters.
I'd like to learn more about setting up a filter like this, as I don't plan on a heavily planted tank. Do you have any good links on this topic?