Lowering salinity...

[LairofUrsula]

Hey all,

New poster here. Wanting some opinions.

I have a 20g (L) tank, currently running as a fish only set-up but I’m in the process of prepping for coral.

This is a tank transfer from my other three year old 20g that sadly sprung a leak, which was a transfer from my first tank, a thriving 6g Nano reef.

I’ve been reefing for about four years now and have never ever battled high salinity and nitrates, but find myself dealing with it in the new tank, which just hit the 4 month old mark. My salinity is reading 1.030 on my refractometer and my nitrates are reading at 80 on my Salifert test. All other parameters read consistently stable in desired range, so I’m a little baffled.

I’m running a coralife 30g HOB filter with built in protein skimmer, and two powerheads positioned at opposite ends of the tank. I also have a Green Machine UV Sterilizer and In my filter I run carbon + phosban + purigen + chemipure blue.

My little tank buddies are my 4 year old ocellaris clown, my 2 year old pygmy angel and my 6 month old sunrise dottyback. I’ve also got a very hungry strawberry conch and about 10 crabs on CUC. They’re all doing great, eating and swimming very well with no signs of distress.

I get my water from my LFS and refractometer tells me it’s at 1.026.

If this was your tank, how would you exactly go about stabilizing salinity and nitrates?

 

[Copingwithpods]

Lowering Salinity is easy and best done slow. Everyday take a few ounces of water out of the tank and discard. For a 20g I'd do 2 every day and let your ATO compensate . This will slowly and safely bring you down to 1.026.

For nitrates it gets a little more complicated as there are a 100 different approaches and it just comes down to which one you want to do.

 

[AquaholicAquariums]

The right answer is slow and steady! I just had an issue with my hanna and icecap reading crazy differences and my salinity was higher then yours. I lowered it to 1.026 within a couple hours and everything was instantly happy!

 

[Copingwithpods]

The right answer is slow and steady! I just had an issue with my hanna and icecap reading crazy differences and my salinity was higher then yours. I lowered it to 1.026 within a couple hours and everything was instantly happy!

I agree with this 100% if your freeloaders don't look happy and are stressed, forget slow bring it down asap. On the other hand if everything is happy and unaffected go slow.