Quote:
Originally Posted by asylumdown
I don't know if I'd worry about the bubbles, it's only a couple of days and they won't hurt anything, but I don't see any harm in the filter floss if it's bugging you. The reason you have to stop skimming is because there's literally not a setting low enough on your skimmer that will stop it from overflowing with that product in the water, not necessarily because of the filtration aspect (though I'm sure that's part of it).
Once the treatment is over and you've done the water change, your skimmer is likely still going to go nuts for a while. I've only used it on this tank once, but after the water change I had to set my skimmer on it's lowest setting and still had to empty the cup a few times a day to get it to settle down.
It would be a good idea to think about adopting a a strategy now to intentionally deal with nitrates. If yours hit 15 (I'm assuming that's measured in ppm), then the tank is producing more of it than it can naturally consume. I mentioned that cyano can grow in low nutrient environments, but it certainly doesn't mind high nutrients either! If you're only relying on human muscle power through water changes and whatever anoxic zones you might have in your rock and sand to do all your denitrifying, you'll need to be very religious about water changes for them to keep nitrates under control long term. Keep in mind that a 20% water change will only drop your nitrates from 15 to 12ppm, and dropping your nitrates to 5ppm in a single shot would require a 66% water change with nitrate free water. If you're going to continue using water changes as the primary tool to address nitrates you'll need to figure out your weekly rate of nitrate production (which will be complicated by any nuisance algae or cyano that will most certainly be taking some of it up), and make sure that your weekly or biweekly water changes are a greater percentage of your system volume than the percentage increase in nitrate concentration each week. There are a bunch of different methods for controlling nitrates in an automated way that work round the clock whether you're on top of water changes or not, but I might suggest not starting any sort of carbon dosing regiment (either solid or liquid) until you've seriously beat back the cyano problem. Adding excess organic carbon to a tank with high nitrate and well established cyano bacteria would be a little like trying to put out a fire by dousing it with gasoline.
Anyway good luck. If it really is cyano, you should see drastic results by tomorrow.
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man thanks for the detailed reply. i am trully not sure what exactly caused my problem, im guessing summer neglets and lack of water changes. also i dont have a tds meter on my rodi unit, im ordering one today aswell as new di filter and also a membrane incase mine is toasted.
what methods do you suggest besides waater changes to lower nitrates? im open to try anything.