Reduce Nitrate need opinion.
 

Okay, I recently removed my bioballs about a week ago and have LR rubble. I have been battling with the nitrates to go down, I've limited my food.

currently I have 20ppm. my goal is to bring it down to 0ppm as I want to start a reef tank.

tank size 75 gallons
livestock:
foxface, damsels 4, two mandarin goby, 3 clowns, 1 flame hawkfish, 2 (puffers(pearl and star and stripe) will be remove once i get corals)

everything is at 0ppm except 20 nitrates...so annoying, i'm running a sump with refugium with cheato DSB with LR. In another side of my sump there is filter floss, phospate filter floss, LR rubble, and nitrate removal stones...and yes i'm running a 125 gal skimmer.

I know the diatoms bloom i'm having is contributing with the nitrate spikes too. I don't know how to effectively get rid of them, I use PRIME to condition my water. I never had any problems before, but after a major water changes because I moved my tank it has been doing this.

I need effective solutions, product suggestions.. thanks.

Your diatoms and nitrates will go diwn in time if you do regular water changes and maintanance. You can still have corals with 20ppm just better for less. To get tozero and stay there you may need to take extra steps , take a look at the nitrate poll thread which was posted last week. My little tank has never hit zero I still have it fully stocked and everything does fine minus a few picky acro's lol:)

hmm..it's just so weird the it has high nitrates...I've reach 0 PPM when I had my 30g tank and it was stable...i guess i'll have to wait and see. do you know any corals that are not too sensitive to nitrates?

I also have 75g, with 25g sump. What i did last time is almost 75% water change for almost a week until 0, then maintain maybe 10% water change every week. Then i also used NP biopellets. Works for me up to now. i overfeed sometimes, still 0.

I run biopellets, Nitrate is near 0. But I found low nitrate is okay, zero may not be good for mixed reef because some corals like higher nitruent. My zoas growth is very very slow, unlike some other reefers.

i'll try those methods.

is my light affecting it?? I have Coralife 48" Lunar AquaLight Fixture - 4 x 65W

I've never heard of lighting causing an increase in nitrate. Not directly anyways. Occasionally someones lights blow up or catch on fire or something and kill much of what is in their tanks. Then what dies would breakdown into nitrate but thats a pretty extreme example.

What is your current water change schedule?

What brand/model of skimmer do you actually have? Don't trust what the manufacturer rates them for as they usually exaggerate. A properly matched skimmer should be able to bring your nitrates down to undetectable levels on its own.

coralife skimmer, 25%weekly.

I also had the nagging nitrate problem. could never get it below 10 ppm and then i changed my protein skimmer to a bubble magus.
I had to go buy a new nitrate test kit because i couldnt get a reading with the old kit, well no reading with the new kit.
been at 0 ppm for three months now.

A higher end skimmer could solve your problem. I personally do not like a single coralife product. I've watched the coralife skimmers in action at our LFS and on a friends tank and I'm really not impressed.