Api No3 Test Kit

[coco*butter]

Since I finish my fishless cycle and added my fish, it is time to test the NO3 but the thing is that my API test kit wont help since it chart jump from 40ppm to 80ppm. I think you need to do a WC at more that 40ppm but with this test kit it might be to late since need to get to 80ppm and there isnt that much a differance in color for me to guess if it get to 50-60-70ppm. Is there a better test kit out there?
thank you

 

[rdd1952]

Actually, you should have been testing your nitrate while you were doing your fishless cycle, at least until it went off the chart just so you know that nitrite is being processed. After the fishless cycle is complete, you do a 90% water change before adding fish so all the nitrate is gone. After the fishless cycle is over, you shouldn't ever see nitrates over 20ppm if you have a weekly maintanence schedule unless it is from your tap water.

 

[coco*butter]

 

[coco*butter]

Isn't NO3 the one that turns red? Cause I been told different. My fishless cycle went great for 2 months and got double zero for a week on Ammonia and NO2. I have my fishless cycle log here and you know I did check for N03 too, for everything Ph GH, KH and my N03 was always 40ppm until I did my 90% water change and now is up to 40ppm.
Many thank to Waterdrop and OM47 for all there help by the way. They told me not to worry much on N03 until fish where in. That when I check it more often so I might see what will be my water changes routine.

 

[OldMan47]

The nitrate card goes from yellow to orange to red to a maroon at 160. If you are trying to get something between 40 and 80 ppm, why not just go for 40 rather than try to get between them?

 

[rdd1952]

Something was definitely wrong with the kit (very important that you get bottle 2 shaken very well and then shake the tube well for the full 1 minute or you will get faulty results) or the cycle if nitrates never got over 40ppm. Usually, they are that high within a week of when nitrite starts to process. Unless your tank is very heavily stocked, you're severely overfeeding or there is a high concentration of nitrate in your tap water, it should take several weeks for the nitrate to get that high.

 

[coco*butter]

The nitrate card goes from yellow to orange to red to a maroon at 160. If you are trying to get something between 40 and 80 ppm, why not just go for 40 rather than try to get between them?

Cause I thought I had to go over 40ppm not on it nor before.

 

[OldMan47]

I guess I don't understand Coco. If you have cycled the tank and are processing ammonia and nitrites well, which I think I remember from other threads, there is no minimum for nitrates. Many of my tanks never show much measurable nitrates because the plants suck them all up. Others show a fair build of nitrates because they are younger tanks that don't yet have much plant growth or they are bare tanks that I am using to isolate new fish. All of the tanks get similar maintenance and end up as healthy environments for fish.
Why do you want nitrates in your water? It is not an essential element for the fish and even for plants there are other ways to feed them nitrogen if they need a supplement.

 

[waterdrop]

I don't think there's any problem here. I don't think coco and hubby -want- nitrates per se. I think they are just trying to understand the new thing of using test kits to give them feedback about their water. Way back when they arrived they mentioned having had successful tanks before but wanted to learn about test kits and improve their understanding of how to use the numbers.

I think any assumptions they have about what the numbers should be comes from trying to interpret the various bits of advice we've posted for them here and that probably we just need to work a bit more on nitrate(NO3). (To start this discussion I should mention to coco that nitrate being zero would be just great for fish but they tolerate it ok, its not a bad toxin like ammonia or nitrite. For rdd and om47 I should mention that I believe coco did a great fishless cycle and is in good shape.)

I also seem to remember that coco had an unusual water source, but admit I've forgotten the details. Coco, let us know the level of nitrate(NO3) in particular and the other parameters of your -source- water (not tank water.)

Because everyone's source water might vary, we don't usually set any hard numbers on what the high limit of Nitrate(NO3) should be, but instead need to find out how much nitrate we are starting with in the tap (or other source) water and then go from there. In a well-maintained (meaning good weekly gravel-clean-water-changes) tank we might expect to see between 5 and 20 extra ppm above whatever the tap/source level is. As said, plants can eat up a significant amount of the NO3 if there are enough of them and if they're growing well. The plants would make the NO3 result be lower.

So for example, if coco had 10ppm of nitrate in the tap water to begin with, then 30ppm in the cycled aquarium would represent an excellent number, meaning that the tank was very clean. A similarly maintained tank that started with zero ppm nitrate in the tap water might only show 20ppm in the running tank. Of course the reason the running tank has more nitrate than the tap water is that the filter is working through the nitrogen cycle and converting all the ammonia (from fish waste etc.) into nitrite and then nitrate.

Coco, perhaps the above, plus what OM47 and RDD have written will all help you to understand it better? They are both even more knowledgeable than me about fishkeeping... I find their comments very trustworthy. We also may need some discussion, more discussion, about how difficult it is to get good nitrate readings because of the shaking and other things.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OldMan47]

A typical case scenario for nitrates is where the fish produce maybe 1 ppm per day of ammonia that gets converted to 3.7 ppm of nitrates and there are no plants in the tank. 3.7 multiplied by 7 for the 7 days in the week between water changes means that nitrates will rise about 25 ppm between weekly water changes. If you are doing big enough water changes to remove about 25 ppm, your tank can hold enough fish stocking levels to produce 1 ppm of ammonia equivalent daily. That is not a big stocking level but is probably close to what most of us are willing to stock a tank. Plants in a heavily planted tank of vigorously growing plants can pull maybe 2 or 3 ppm daily of nitrates out of the water. That means that they can almost balance the nitrogen input of a relatively normal fish stocking level. It is what lets people go a long time between water changes on a NPT. Running an NPT means running a high level of plants and rapid growing plants at that. Those plants prevent any build of nitrates or other poisons.

 

[waterdrop]

A typical case scenario for nitrates is where the fish produce maybe 1 ppm per day of ammonia that gets converted to 3.7 ppm of nitrates and there are no plants in the tank. 3.7 multiplied by 7 for the 7 days in the week between water changes means that nitrates will rise about 25 ppm between weekly water changes. If you are doing big enough water changes to remove about 25 ppm, your tank can hold enough fish stocking levels to produce 1 ppm of ammonia equivalent daily. That is not a big stocking level but is probably close to what most of us are willing to stock a tank. Plants in a heavily planted tank of vigorously growing plants can pull maybe 2 or 3 ppm daily of nitrates out of the water. That means that they can almost balance the nitrogen input of a relatively normal fish stocking level. It is what lets people go a long time between water changes on a NPT. Running an NPT means running a high level of plants and rapid growing plants at that. Those plants prevent any build of nitrates or other poisons.

Very nice example of how the numbers might work there, OM. I like that example. Just as an aside on the topic of natural planted tanks (NPT) I wonder if you've ever had a feeling like I've had that some subset of well-cared-for aquariums in the 50's/60's may have operated very close to an NPT system, despite that concept not having been around in its present form and despite a few other basics that were not understood with the same completeness. I specifically remember observing some aquariums in 1959 that looked a lot like a typical NPT of today and of course many of the maintenance habits would have coincided. I feel that although there were misunderstandings about "old water" in that era, there were probably stretches of time for some of those tank when they might have been running quite nicely on basically the same conditions as a NPT.

Another, completely different, NPT observation I've made in the last year or so that I've been meaning to mention if I haven't already is that although one of the basic precepts of the NPT is to go quite long stretches between water changes (and in fact Diana prescribes to that both in her writing and verbally) I've nonetheless come across a number of NPT practitioners who readily say that increasing the water change frequency is perhaps the one area where they differ with her. In fact, some of the ones I've talked to both at aga and in raleigh go pretty far back in their familiarity with the NPT practices. Of course, it makes plenty of sense that people are going to feel the need for variations. There are differences in stocking levels among other things.

(apologies to coco for my yakkng about off-topic stuff (!) hope things are going ok in coco's tank!)

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OldMan47]

Agreed WD. I have a few tanks now that are more or less NPTs and the way I ran my tanks in the 50s was basically in that general direction. I only usually let my NPTs run 3 months between water changes instead of Diana's 6 months and I run sponge filters in mine rather than just power heads. We all adapt what we do to what our experiences teach us. I was unwilling to go all the way to depending entirely on the plants as my only method of filtration.

 

[waterdrop]

Agreed WD. I have a few tanks now that are more or less NPTs and the way I ran my tanks in the 50s was basically in that general direction. I only usually let my NPTs run 3 months between water changes instead of Diana's 6 months and I run sponge filters in mine rather than just power heads. We all adapt what we do to what our experiences teach us. I was unwilling to go all the way to depending entirely on the plants as my only method of filtration.

Yes, so I think you have company on the slightly more frequent water changes, in fact I think most of the ones I talked to changed even more frequently than you. In some ways I almost think her interest in longer stretches without changes and in sunlight hitting the tank a lot are her ways of "pushing" the envelope kind of like she did with soil years ago. WD