Nitrate lowering after cycle

[Reefster78]

Hello Reefers.
After cycle completed my nitrates are way too high around 160ppm no livestock in tank yet & no light.
will nitrates lower naturally or should i do big water changes or maybe use no-po-x?
thanks everyone

 

[threebuoys]

How did you manage to get nitrates that high with no fish? Ammonia overdose? Something doesn't sound right.
At this point, water change is only option, but I'd like to understand how you "cycled" the tank in the first place.

 

[Reefster78]

How did you manage to get nitrates that high with no fish? Ammonia overdose? Something doesn't sound right.
At this point, water change is only option, but I'd like to understand how you "cycled" the tank in the first place.

with Dr Tims one and only + ammonium chloride

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Did you add 40 ppm of ammonia over time?

If you did not, the nitrate may be test error from a little residual nitrite showing as a huge amount of nitrate.

 

[Azedenkae]

What Randy said.

The nitrate test kit actually works by converting a small portion to nitrite, and then measure that as a proxy. Entirely possible that when you were measuring the very high nitrate, you had nitrite, and that caused the nitrate to read falsely high. Then once nitrite was all gone, nitrate reads what it really is.

 

[brandon429]

thats only if his test kit and test procedure align to report nitrate correctly, even after nitrite compliance wait time is factored.

we can see in some searchable test kit comparison threads reported results can easily change by as much as 50 ppm per sample per common kit.

so even when you measure nitrate six months from now, another kit on the same sample might just claim a wildly different reading. its possible to run reefs without having to consider ammonia nitrite and nitrate too, handy to keep options open.

for example, Paul's old reef is said to run 160 ppm nitrate at times in his posts. harmless for him.