Water Quality Question

[KateW]

Hi

Hope you don't mind me picking your collective brains, but I have a bit of a question about water quality/chemistry.

I have a new 30 litre tank that has been running for about four months. I did a water test two days ago and the results were:

pH 7.6

Ammonia 0 ppm

Nitrite 0 ppm

Nitrate 80 ppm.

So I did a 30% water change, and tested again a day later. All the results were the same except Nitrate which had reduced, but only to 40 ppm. I used an API Freshwater Mastertest kit, as recommended by most posters on this site.

Having read some of the other threads and general advice, I thought this sounded a bit high, and so I tested the tap water - this also seemed to come out at about 40 ppm for nitrate.


Is this too high? It seems logical that to keep good water quality you need to start with good quality water. I currently add Tetra AquaSafe (recommended by LFS) before putting new water in the tank, and make sure it is a similar temperature etc. Is there anything else I can/should do to reduce the nitrates before adding the new water? Any advice would be gratefully received.

FAOD the fish seem quite happy - swimming energetically and feeding well, nice bright colours, so no obvious issues. I just want to be a responsible fish keeper!


Thanks in advance.

Kate

 

[dayzofspeed]

40ppm nitrate is nothing at all to worry about

 

[KateW]

Wow, thank you for the quick response. I shall just carry on as I am then, thank you for the reassurance.

 

[Rynofasho]

Yep, 80ppm is a bit high but still not deadly, 40ppm is safe, and if you would like to keep them down you can also add some live plants too which will use the nitrate.

 

[FreedomFighter]

Yup as said above, not dangerous levels at all, your water seems pretty good!

And again as above, some live plants will help bring those nitrates down.

What fish are you keeping?

 

[waterdrop]

Agree with the others, these levels are not going to cause major troubles. The best you can do is to maintain good gravel-cleaning-water-changing weekend habits and this will minimize the amount of nitrate your system is adding beyond what is coming in from the water changes. The water changes are also about removing hundreds of other substances too, its just that we measure nitrate(NO3) and talk about it, that's all.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[KateW]

Thanks all for the helpful responses, I am glad I have nothing too much to worry about. Will certainly look at the plant section of the forum for ideas.

I wish I had found this forum earlier on, I certainly would have approached the set up more carefully. I am getting in to good water change/gravel cleaning habits so hopefully they will be happy fish

Currently I have:

3 neon tetras (out of an original 5)

5 small guppies

2 corydoras trilineatus - mislabelled in the lfs as c. julii. I did get three but one disappeared several weeks ago - have never found any evidence of him


I think the corys are my favourite so far, they really are very sweet, bumbling around on the bottom together. But do you think they need a couple of friends? I know they like to be in a slightly bigger group, but I am wary of over stocking. Is it correct to say that they would be happy with any type of small cory?