Just about had it now!!!

[Reefer Rob]

I'm going to out on a limb here and say I think it's your sand. In my 180G that's been running since January I've gone to 1" of sand for aesthetics that I gravel vac once a month or so. Looking back, the only thing sand has ever done in my tanks is increase nitrates. The more sand I had, the more nitrates I had.

In my last tank I run an remote DSB and had 20 ppm nitrates. After I took it off-line they went to 10 ppm within a week.

With 2"s of sand you would be safe to suck out 1" and gravel vac the rest. Guaranteed you're going to get a ton of crud out of there

[bv_reefer]

-did u try siphoning out some of the detritus on ur sand bed or detritus and waste under live rock crevices? fish tend 2 spill uneaten food,spill it,drop it, and disturb it all the time.

-another common tip i've heard iz arranging a loose formation system
for ur live rock but it looks like u alredy got that down!

-well anyways don't let nitrates spoil ur hobby! u've already got soo far!

[midgetwaiter]

I'd take a look at the sand for sure. The sand bed debate is up there with politics and religion but I don't think anyone can argue that there are people out there with sand beds and nitrate problems, For some reason nobody can figure the beds aren't working right and are probably contributing to issuesby trapping crud.

The other thing to look at is the fuge, what kind of growth are you getting in there? From my experience a cheato fuge that is really working well is the best nitrate / phosphate removal tool there is. To get it really working you need to put a little work into it though. A good goal would be having good enough growth that you can remove half your cheato and have it replenish in 10 to 14 days. To do that you need some good lighting, Philip's Daylight CFs work good with reflectors, and you MUST dose iron.

[andresont]

I second the idea of sand being a trap for detritus. Just get rid of a little bit every time you do a water change.
I 've gone BB and my ORP went up 60 points in one week. That tells me that sand bed takes a lot of oxygen. Also with BB it is so easy to syphone all out when doing water change so staff has no chance to decay.

[PoonTang]

Also try testing your carbon for nitrates. Aparently some types of carbon can contain nitrate and release it into the water.

[findingnemo1]

Okay we'll thanks everybody for the input. I am going to start taking the sand bed out slowly. And then i am going to see how that works and if not i think i will try the denitrator and see if that works. Hopefully that will work and that will be the end of it. If not i dunno. My confusa is pretty mush gone but the acroporas still look okay so i guess we will see what happens. If not i will just give up on sps and go with softies

Thanks again
Craig

I wil keep it updated anyways