please help

hey i was wondering what i should do about my nitrates. ive been doing 25% water changes for the last 4 days and my nitrates dont seem to be going down. they seem to be staying at 40ppm. what may be the cause of this?

nitrites, amonia = 0ppm
ph = 8.2
temp = 80 deggres farenhiet
2 clownfish, 1 yellow tang, 1 sand shifting star, 2 firefish, 2 blue damsels
live sand and live rock
protien skimmer
carbon filter

 

it has to be the water your using or something is dying in your tank. water change should help bring it down. or your test are bad

 

How big of a tank is it, how much live rock, how much & how often are you feeding?

What brand & type of test kits are you using (test kit vs strips), and like asked how old are they.

Water changes alone wont get rid of the nitrates, it merely dilutes them.

 

This does not belong in ASAP

Tank size and how much do you feed and what tools do you employ to keep the tank clean and nitrate free? (CuC, skimmer, etc.).

When you do a 25% water change you are removing 25% of nitrates. In this case, you are removing 10 ppm. So after your WC, your nitrates are around 30. It means your nitrates climb at a rate of 2.5ppm per day.

There are sooo many reasons this could be but it probably has to do with some combination of too little live rock/fish overstocking/overfeeding/too small a clean up crew/not enough mechanical filtration (skimmer).

Something *might* be dead and decaying BUT your CuC/filtration should be able to handle that giving a temporary nitrate spike at worse. So even if there is a dead something, that isn't the root problem here.

EDIT: reread it, are you saying you are doing daily 25% changes? I originally read it as 25% every 4 days. Adjust my numbers accordingly

 

LOL, yeah, I forgot about strips. If you're using "test" strips, then you really have no idea what your params are. Those are as good as eyeballing nitrate levels If that's what you're using you may have no problem at all... test with a real kit to find out...