High nitrates

nlutfi

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I've been battling LCA dinos for awhile now, I'm slowly starting to see progress with dosing pods, phyto and bacteria. For the most part I have been able to keep my phos around .03-.08 and nitrates 10-20 but recently I am having a huge cyano outbreak (which seems like its helping out compete the dinos) but I'm having a huge nitrate spike around 40-50 ppm and I'm not sure why? My phos is also starting to get closer to 0 around .01-.02. Any tips on lowering nitrates or what the cause could be. I plan on sending out a ICP test this week as well. My filtrating is a filter roller, skimmer and algae scrubber if that matters. Thanks!
 

Biglew11

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.01-.02 phophates is getting pretty close to zero. I found when mine got this low my nitrates started to rise.

The biological filter needs both phosphates and nitrates. If one is limited, the other one will increase.
 

Idech

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In my tank (now 6 months old) adding phyto daily caused a nitrate increase. I had to stop dosing it and now do it maybe every two weeks only.

Until my tank gets more mature and nitrates get processed better and decrease. With feeding less and only frozen and nori, nitrates have very slowly gone down from 22 ppm to 17 ppm. This is a slow process but I’m against adding anything to speed it up.
 
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nlutfi

nlutfi

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.01-.02 phophates is getting pretty close to zero. I found when mine got this low my nitrates started to rise.

The biological filter needs both phosphates and nitrates. If one is limited, the other one will increase.
Thanks! Any on just raising phos and not the nitrate?
 

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