Going to do 20-30% changes over the course of the next two weeks, I was thinking of adding a full bottle of bio spira at the end of the all the water changes to keeps things balanced. Good idea or bad idea?
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Why?
If you're asking "why " I'm doing the water changes : Have been away from the tank awhile, been traveling for work, nitrates are high and nitrite at 2ppm, going to need to do multiple changes to bring everything back to normal.
If you're asking "why" I'm planning to use Bio Spira: I feel like multiple water changes will strip a lot from the tank... and also I have a bottle laying aroundlol
He did say he has nitrite unless it's a false reading something is going on.Is that the reason for using the bio spira?
Dricc
Great call
The first sentence we covered in our reef cycling thread was to not test for nitrite, ever. Save the headache, the misleads
Just for those kinds of reasons. Prime water conditioner is a huge false positive nitrite cause, we simply don't even need to know nitrite data. Not even during dry surface cycling, nitrite isn't needed to know in reefing.
Perhaps in medication/ hospital tanks. Past that, nope. Aquaculture and production level bioloading is different, home reefs don't generate nitrite after maturation given accountability for all fish, no meds, and no sourcewater input and no huge organic waste stores in the tank. Has to be a false point of sale unless one of those, imo.
True....is the tank completely cycled? Overstocked, or stocked too quickly?
post pics of this tank, let's see if the rock has been submerged past forty days. From pics alone and not test readings from API we can discern your ammonia readings and nitrite given a few common indicators pics convey so well
Dricc I guess an overfeed could cause it, but nitrite is inconsequential in our setups. Only the ammonia portion of that event would be risky, and nitrite won't show in any normal tank feeding... including his bioload ones especially given a year. If it was accurate and due to overfeed it won't hurt anything to do a nice water change anytime you feel like it.
In Randy's chem forum they discuss how the chloride levels we deal with render the nitrite neutral impact...a neat way to see it historically is that all cycling charts online show nitrite complying by day thirty or forty (that's where we get our submersion time factor for cycling in this thread below) and that nitrite follows ammonia behavior by day forty as well on all online cycle charts. Testing for nitrite trending is ok for sure but I wouldn't change course based on a reading. If your fish aren't panting at the top, no ammonia event has occurred and that would matter.