Urgent Help Required !

[smeagol]

Please help. I have had my tank for over one year now and all my water parameters have been fine. KH has always been 10 and nitrate always been 0.1 (really sorry for not using correct measurements, it was a Tropic Marin test kit which i threw away due to having for one year) I have not tested for 2 months which was my first stupid irresponsible fault !! today i purchased KH/Alk profi test and Nitrate profi test by salifert. I tested as soon as got home and was absolutley horrified by the results. Throughout the 2 months i had continued with my normal maintenance water changes. So sorry, i will go back to basics. I have a 190 l Aqua one tank. Roughly about 80kg of Live rock. A V2 400 skimmer. 2 external filters. 1 marroon clown, 1 skunk clown, 1 blue throat trigger, 1 yellow tang, 1 anenome, various mushroom corals, pulsing xenia and a full clean up crew.
I am always very careful with feeding, mainly feeding them through a 50ml syringe which they all eat straight from. I know it sounds silly and it probably means nothing but they all seem so healthy but obviously I am worried sick.
Anyway the results I found were shocking........KH above the scale of 16.0dKH and nitrate at about 100 NO3 mg/L (=ppm) I have just mixed up my salt with RO water and will be completing my routine 2 week water change tomorrow (25L)
Any suggestions greatly recieved. i am absolutely distraught and am willing to do anything.......... Thank you

 

[pengy666]

WOW

I think best thing you can do is slowly over next week or so it does a massive water change!

Like 50% or more?

but if everyone seems healthy and all are eating then just do it gradually so not to distress or shock the livestock?

hopefully with a continued routine as well as a water change it will help lower your params?

also get a second opinon on your readings from your "trusted" LFS just to make sure there isnt an error or something?

Not sure what else to suggest but If it was me i would try to do this rather than trying to dose tank withs stuff? I'm sure Musho would agree on that? he had troubles with adding stuff (not same problems tho)

Im sure most people would suggest same as me?

HTH

Good luck

 

[Musho3210]

uhh, tank seems a bit small, maybe with all those fish and small tank and external filters (if its mechanical and you dont clean/change it once every 1-3 days) is leading to a nitrate spike. But i dont see how the alk could be that high if you arent dosing..... something could be wrong with the test kit....

 

[smeagol]

is 4 fish alot for this size tank ??? double checked with aquatic shops before (as i did today ) n they said it was o.k.is 4 fish alot for this size tank ??? double checked with aquatic shops before (as i did today ) n they said it was o.k.

 

[Musho3210]

its not the amount of fish, its the size of the fish, the marron and the trigger and the tang will all get quite big

 

[SkiFletch]

As worrysome as the nitrates are, the kH scares me even more... So you're telling me that you fill your indicator cup with 4mL of water with the syringe, add 2 drops of the KH-IND solution, and squirt the entire 1cc syringe into the cup with NO color change? If so, I didn't know this was physically possible with saltwater... My reccomendation is to first test the water you do changes with and see what it reads before you use it.

Also, what's your input-water source? RO? Distilled?