Water change and nitrates still a little high???

Okay my tank has been set up for a little over a month with nothing but LR and a clean up crew and peppermint shrimp everything looked good, added two chromies in after it being set up for 3 wks (recommended by LFS) because everything looked good at 0 and I have live sand and pre-made salt water in the tank, well they died within 24hrs and the nitrates were up so they said to do a 25% water change in my case I have a 29 gallon it was 5 gallons, so we did it and they are still showing up pink on the strip in the ' ideal range' and are suppose to be white, what else can you do to get these down? I'm ready to add some fish , and my first fish are going to be clowns. I performed the water change on friday... everything else looks great just these nitrates...

 

You probably have other issues besides nitrates, fish can survive quite well with nitrates in the hundreds. Do you have your own test kits? If not I would suggest you get something like the API saltwater or reef master test kit and test yourself. What is your ammonia, nitrites(both can be toxic), nitrates, pH, temperature and salinity for starters? What are you using for filtration and circulation/oxygenation? What are your temperature swings in a 24hr period, high and low?

You probably need to do a series of 20%-25% water changes over several days to get the nitrates down until you have some way of exporting the nitrates like a refugium with macroalgaes.

 

First thing I'd suggest is getting rid of the dip strips. They're not accurate IMO. If you don't want to spend alot API master reef kit is usually under 30 bucks and you'll be able to test ph, ammonia, nitrates and nitrites.
Are you skimming at all?
Nitrate reduction is directly proportional to waterchange %. i.e. If you want to reduce your N03 by half than you have to do a 50% w/c.

 

It sounds as though your tank if pretty new. this being the case I wouldnt add anything until you are sure it has completed its cycle. once your tank has fully cycled, you may stil end up with nitrate issues. Most tanks will have some. With water changes will be able to keep them under control. the best way to control them however is to find the source of them problem and fix it, or setup a sump/fuge with macro algee.

 

The only testing kit I have are the strips and everything shows fine except the nitrates, which I have read those strips are no good appearantly lol. I will look into getting a master kit today to find out what is going on.

For equipment I have a 55 gallon hang off the back filter, a power head, and a hang off the back protien skimmer, and a thermometer. Our temps stay between 80 and 82.

What is a refugium?

 

I have a skimmer yes a pretty big one that is hang off the back but I was told not to run it right now because it is a new tank so i unplugged it 3 days ago. It had been running for about 2wks and it seemed as if it wasn't skimming there was no foam in the collection cup.

 

My tank has been set up since march 2nd 2010. We've been adding LR slowly and the LR we bought was already cured and had a bunch of purple algae all over it, some of the rock came from the LFS reef tank that was set up for 2 yrs that they moved into the rock curing ben. How do you know when the tank has completed it's cycle? We thought it did and then obviously it did not. Everything looked good and the cleaner crew/shrimp is great b ut the fish did not make it...

 

Each time you add more rock you will go through at least a small cycle regardless if the rock was "cured" or not.