paramiters all out of wack! need help fast

Guitar man - your spot on

Steve

 

sorry guys I had to pick up my kids. live rock is 70 pounds. I don't have a pump to run the new skimmer since I am going to run it off a manifold. I'll clean and replace the bio balls, add an air stone, and do the water change. I'll post the results in the am. thanks for the help.

 

When you do the bioballs, only do a third at a time. Give them a week or two between stages.

 

ok will do. thanks

 

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone that replied to this one more time.

A little update. The bio balls were caked full of crap to keep it PG13. I cleaned a 1/3 of them. I added the air stone and the new saltwater is still mixing. I will wait to add that till it is properly mixed.

 

Vegas if they were covered with gunk there is a good chance that overfeeding is the problem. More then likely this is food being trapped in here and that may explain a few things with how it is testing.

You may want to add some mechanical filtration on your prefilter/intake and see how fast that clogs up. May find out that you are feeding them an awful lot. You'll need to be pretty regular on cleaning this or the problem may remain.

GL

 

Feeding

Yeah sounds about right IMO. It's the only thing you said is different. New food they may not like too much, so for 2 weeks they eat less of it and so on..sounds right?

Hope you get it under control,
Mike

 

Jakerupe and coolridernum1

I think you are both right. My fish are going on a diet along with the aforementioned quick changes. I think this will solve the problem.

One thing that took a back seat to the High nitrate rightfully so is that I have 1.0 phosphate in tank and 0 at the ro/di source. Does anyone want to take a guess on what could be causing this?

 

Lol

LOL funny i cant know it all silly..

But i would say that your wet dry was over run with crap and couldn't do its job? or just time to replace your Phosphate remover pad? "if you have one

LOL i really don't know just wild guesses,
Mike

 

Vegasfish, You said you made your own cubes. I was told a while back to rinse off all frozen foods with tap water until they thaw out and this will keep phosphates out of your tank. I would cut the food portion in half. I would get some cheap floss and strategically find an area in your filtration and swap it out with a new piece every other day or so. See for yourself all the crap that's running through your system. Also the water should clear up too. A cheap alternative to extra water changes. Check your test kit. Bring a water sample to a quality LFS and see if he gets the same parameters. Otherwise go slowly with changes. If it's fesable to separate the bioballs in the bioball chamber use eggcrate this way you can regularly clean 1/3 of them each month by just keeping a log of what you did. If you don't use phosgard or something I would definitely get on that and change the bag monthly. I use Phoslock, it's costly but works. Just some ideas man good luck.