Hey everyone, Devon here from American Aquarium
Products.
Thank you for tuning in and learning about
a very important popular topic.
How to reduce and manage aquarium nitrates.
Something we all battle.
So, going through all these steps will ensure
to help you keep a low and sufficient level
of nitrates in a aquarium.
Before we learn how to reduce aquarium nitrates,
what are exactly nitrates?
Fish food and other nitrogen waste goes into
our aquarium and goes through decomposition
cycle, which is taking Ammonia and converting
it to nitrate, then nitrates are covered into
a free nitrogen, which is a gas that will
remain in the water or removed by plants or
other denitrification aerobic bacteria.
Or they're removed by way of regular water
change or chemical absorbent.
Without this process it would be impossible
to keep inhabits in our aquarium as ammonia
is highly toxic in even small quantities.
Nitrates are not toxic to most freshwater
fish excite in high amounts with long exposure.
Saltwater fish can be more sensitive.
So, an established nitrogen cycle needs to
be in place.
This subject can be debatable of how much
nitrates actually are too much.
But what I think we can all agree on is there's
a need to manage these with stability, whatever
the level may be.
The process we need to be most concerned about
is denitrification, were unlike nitrification
that converts ammonia and nitrite, denitritication
converts nitrate, which is NO3 into Nitrogen
Gas, N2 which is removed from the aquarium.
There's types of bacteria that either drive
nitrification and denitrification.
The bacteria that drives denitritication are
called heterotrophic.
Creating a place for these heterotroph to
grow is a natural way of nitrate reduction.
These heterotroph bacteria are an anaerobic
bacteria, which means they grow in places,
which limited to no oxygen, such in a deep
sand bed or a mud bed.
Nitrification will happen in the 1 to 2 inch
of the substrate.
Denitrification will happen in the 2 to 4
inch range of a substrate, sulfur fixing anaerobic
bacteria will be lower than 4 inches.
In this deep zones getting some oxygen to
this zone will lead to more denitrification
via roots, copepods, etc.
So, what do we do for high nitrates?
While generally not toxic, high nitrates over
50ppm can harm fish health in freshwater.
And generally 20ppm in saltwater.
Here's some suggestions.
First use SeaChem Prime or other to neutralize
the nitrate, but this is not a long term solution.
Next perform a water change using a gravel
vac to remove not only dirty water, but also
mulm, which is decomp, before it goes through
the nitrogen cycle.
Next, make sure to regularly rise, in aquarium
water for dechlorinated water your bio media.
This includes bio rings and balls as well
as sponges filters, ceramic media, which are
known to be nitrate factories.
These nitrate factory types of filtration
typically should be used in saltwater water,
unless there's a high amount of denitrification
biomedia, like live rock, volcanic rock, matrix,
or ceramic media.
Nitrates can be removed by just switching
out these filter systems, known to be more
nitrate factories, such as again, canister
filters, wet dry filters, wet drys, Emperor
filters, and the before said sponge filter.
For freshwater adding aquatic plants can be
very beneficial especially using hornwort.
For saltwater, some green algae will deform
this nitrate reducing task, saltwater caulerpa
algae for example.
For saltwater, a refugium or protein skimmer
is very helpful.
Refugium use plants with strong light to remove
nutrients including nitrates.
Protein skimmers remove nitrates, before they
enter the nitrogen cycle via foam refraction.
A very effective complement to a protein skimmer
for a marine tank and freshwater while using
absorbent chemical filtration is using NPX
Bio-plastics.
There's links below for how to build a very
effective refugium also a deep sand bucket
filter.
Make sure to check that out.
Next, the use of premium over the counter
waste digester, such as SeaChem Stability,
which contain these heterotrophic bacteria
for the waste digestion.
Also consider a fluidizes sand filter, paired
with the product NPX bio-plastics, but also
if you can consider a very tall sand filter,
where denitrification happens in the top part
of the filter.
Attached is also an article that talks about
other method on how to manage nitrates.
Going over how to relief nitrate poisoning.
Lowing bio-load and fish load, reducing feeding,
the use of RO and DI water, sugar and vodka
dosing, sulfur denitrators, porosity biomedia,
polymers, resins, absorbents, and organic
removers, algae scrubbers, types of pads,
and some myths about nitrates.
I hope that information is helpful for you
guys.
I really appreciate you guys checking out
the video.
If you have any questions, make sure to ask
and please make sure to like, subscribe, share
with your friends.
We really appreciate it and we'll talk to
you guys next time.
Bye
