Zero nitrate...finally

[Bryceandmandy]

Hey all mandy and i have been relatively quiet on here lately, life gets busy. Our nitrates, through a pattern of neglect, rose to unreadable levels. This really deterred us from buying any liestock, as it should. We finally got around to making some changes and have cured the issue. We essentially performed a massive overhaul on our filtration and did a very deep clean on our tabk. We removed our in-sump refugium, mud and all, and changed skimmers. We went from a red sea berlin turbo skimmer, not sure which model but i can say theyre not great, to an eshopps cone 120. We now have a ton of liverock, a large skimmer for our 57gal and chemipure as our filtration as well as sponge pads and a filtersock. We also painstakingly removed tons of detritus from our liverock with powerheads and polishing pads as well with as a nifty desilting tool i made from 3/16" thinwall and 1/2" tubing. We were getting cyano ( red slime) in a few areas, namely deadspots and the sand. We increased water movement to these areas and gravel vaccumed our sand. Our sand is only 2 1/2" deep at most so i wasnt worried about disturbing aenerobic pockets. These methods combined effectively lowered our nitrate and essentially removed all cyano. Vaccuming sand is unorthodox and so is removing a refugium but it was necessary and payed off pretty well. We never used any chemi clean or red slime remover. We just eliminated the food source, we changed the set of conditions that allowed the cyano to thrive. Skimmers really help but physical removal is where youll do the most for nitrate reduction. hope this helps.
For testing we used an API, Red Sea, and Red Sea Pro kits.