Thanks for the response, Myka. Good advice, and can't disagree with anything you said. The best solution would be to take my tank apart, clean everything, rearrange my live rock and corals, and basically reset up the entire tank. I plan to do that down the road, but would like to try a few things first to see if I can bring down the nitrates without redoing everything. Like I said, everything in the tank looks pretty healthy, except my nitrates are high.
Currently I vacuum my sand bed, clean my live rock with a tooth brush where I see some debris or algae, and clean my filters about every 2 weeks, but there many parts that I can't get at, so no doubt that is contributing to the nitrate problem with the collection of detritus. I do have lots of flow in the tank, so that is a good thing. But I do have some sponge and filter material in the filters to catch any floating debris. But I try to clean those frequently, before they can produce too much nitrate, but quite possibly they are contributing to the problem as well.
I try to feed my fish carefully, mostly freeze dried, which floats and gets eaten before it settles. Also, I feed pellets, but again make sure they are consumed. They do get some frozen, maybe once a week, but that is well washed in RO water, before going into my tank. And I don't think I have too many fish for my tank size. I have already sold a couple fish, one large Bird Wrasse, which was a real pig eater. So my fish bio load has come down. My biggest eaters currently are the Foxface, and the Cinnamon Clown. The Foxface keeps growing, though, so I guess that doesn't help.
In any case, I still want to try the bio pellet route, just to see if this would work on my tank. If not, or it causes other problems, will then have to get on with redoing the tank. I have read and talked to some people that said it worked wonders for them, with reducing nitrate, and handling a high bio load.
So, I am still looking for suggestions on what bacteria starter to use, and how to kill cyano. From what I have read, those are very important cautions with using bio pellets.
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