Maintenance

[SensesFail]

Hi guys!

Well it's been a week now and my ammonia, nitrite readings are 0. I changed the water on Tuesday and after the water change (changed 60L out of 190) I tested nitrate had 5. So I changed a fudged 40L and got it to 0.

Today I did a 60L water change which is the 4th day after doing the last and again the same happened changed water got 5 nitrate so changed 40L got the same. I tested the tap water for nitrate and I have it at 5ppm so that will explain things! School boy error not checking it in the first place but seems weird how I got it to 0 which I would think would be impossible if my tap water has 5ppm. Why would this happen?

Am I doing the following correctly and how much should I be changing water wise? At the moment iv been doing the above but had thought of doing 50L every 4 days. When I'm doing the water changes I vacuum the sand as best I can (without sucking all of the sand up) and I just go around all of the ornaments. I plan to take all of the decorations out once a month and do a complete vac of the whole tank. This leads into another question ...... How is this possible with the fish being in the tank? My sinos spend most of the time in the ocean rock which will mean I'll have to be extremely careful not to remove the rocks with them in! And also when you put the rocks back not to squash the fish as such (sorry if it sounds daft).

Filter wise maybe rinse the sponges every week and carry out main filter maintenance once a month taking the filter apart to properly clean.

What is the max nitrate level you should let that tank get 2 before jumping for the bucket?

Cheers guys! I want to make sure I get this perfect so my fish don't suffer and have the best conditions physically possible!

 

[waterdrop]

I forget whether those plants are all plasic?

 

[SensesFail]

I forget whether those plants are all plasic?

Yer all plastic nothing real apart from the guys.

 

[karin]

That is a pretty aggressive maintenance regime. I water change 20 percent per week while siphoning the top of the sand or vacuming the gravel. I have never moved ornaments much, more in the gravel tank. I squeeze out filter sponges once a month on the HOB and once every two months on the canister.

Some say that fish are not bothered by nitrates under 400 ppm... most people like it under 100 with 40 being a common number thrown around. Know that the tests for nitrates are very unreliable. I typically don't even test for this parameter. With regular water changes I don't think it is a problem that you need to fret over.

 

[waterdrop]

Darn, was hoping for the easy answer

Well, I always feel though that there's a lot going on down at the levels we're talking about. It's easy for us to lose site of the fact that the numbers we bandy about daily are in "parts per million," Have you thought about that much? It's really pretty amazing the darn tests can measure the stuff at all!

And the NO3? Well, that's one nitrogen and two oxygens and we certainly see these individual atoms getting used in other things and even more to the point, we see NO3 groups occuring on organic (definition of organic being that the source of the molecule involved living things at some point) molecules of larger size.

Remembering that there are hundreds and hundreds of different sorts of organic molecules floating around in our tanks, we might speculate that the nitrate ions get variously caught up in many of these and in some cases not measured by our kits thereafter. There are also lots of metal-NO3 combinations (Ferric-nitrate, Chromium-nitrate, on and on) and in these and other ways, nitrate ions add themselves to the "total dissolved solids" (TDS) level of any given sample of water.

It also may be that this is just yet another way that our inexpensive (as indeed, even our best little liquid kits are inexpensive relative to lab equipment) liquid kits can't measure nitrate accurately, ie. when it is "bound" in various ways.

A good water biochemist would probably laugh at my attemp here and give us a better explanation, but for what it's worth, that's one of the directions I can think of!

~~waterdrop~~

 

[SensesFail]

Well today i did half and half i cleaned half of the tank removing decorations and plants i shall do the other half on sat due to moving big rocks and my gf can help watching for fish!

I also did a basic filter clean in that i rinsed the sponges in old tank water and dipped the ceramics in the bucket of water clearing any debris from the sponges. when i re connected everything and switched it back on i got loads of crap coming into the tank for a short period so i grabbed the vac and started trying to catch it all! is this normal and ok??

Do i ned to empty the water in the canister along with the debris at the bottom of the canister container or do you just leave that?? is everything else i did ok? and am i advised to test say tonight just to make sure i have not damaged anything?

Cheers Guys

 

[fluttermoth]

I only move my rocks and ornaments occasasionally. Once every couple of months I'll lift one up and go underneath. Doing half the tank once a week or fortnight, then the other half should be fine.

Filters spewing out crud when they're switched back on is normal and nothing to get in a panic over. I honestly believe that it's the stuff in the water that you can't see that is more harmful than the stuff you can. Let your filter do what it's designed for and suck it back up!

As long as your removing the water from the bottom of the tank where the heavier pollutants tend to be you'll be doing the most important thing.

I always empty the water out of my canister when I'm doing filter maintenance; I've been told that nitrates tend to 'collect' there, so it seems like a good idea to dump it.