Have you figured out you nitrate source yet? make sure you don't have deposits of detritus built up somewhere. With all the new knowledge you've gained just from this post I'm sure you will get them down soon enough.
I bring some good news! I've managed to bring the salinity levels down to 1.023s.g. so now I can concentrate solely in bringing down these nitrate levels.
I decided to do some detective work and made a list of possible nitrate sources:
1. Dirty protein skimmer- we cleaned our protein skimmer for the first time this week (2 months after setting the tank up). This isn't because we forgot about it but because it never got dirty.. I realise now that this is probably because we didn't used to top off our water to the top of the tank everyday, resulting in our water not circulating through our filtration system. Now that we've been doing this, we've been able to give our skimmer a good clean.
2. Dirty power head- we decided to give our power head a good clean this week as well and it turns out that it really needed one! A lot of what I assume was decomposing leftover food was stuck in the power head- I will also assume that this is probably causing our nitrates to be so high.
3. Dirty tank in general- even with our power head on its highest setting, food will still manage to settle on our gravel. I'm planning to get a gravel scooper so that we can give our gravel a good tossing to remove any buried debris.
4. Overfeeding- I've changed our food from brine shrimp to mysis shrimp and I'm feeding MUCH less to my chromis. I'm guessing that this will stop so much food being sucked into the power head and settling onto our gravel.
5. Saltwater? Like a true detective, I tried to single out every single possible source of nitrates so I tested the saltwater that our aquatics centre gives us for water changes. I should say, I did dilute this water with RO to bring it down to a 1.010s.g. and used this dilute saltwater to bring down the salinity of our tank more gradually (and I don't plan on using it again). After testing- I got a 10ppm nitrate reading so I'm not sure if this is the cause of our nitrate levels (but like I said, I did dilute this water with RO way before I decided to test it so who knows...).
So, I'm pretty sure that our high nitrate levels are due to a mixture of overfeeding and poor tank keeping in general. I've added a protein skimmer clean and powerhead clean to our weekly 'to do' list so hopefully this will prevent our nitrates from increasing once we start doing major water changes.
I've showed my dad a RO/DI unit and TDS meter that would best suit our tank and its requirements. We should hopefully order it by the end of this week and get started with water changes next week. Until then, I will be working on maintaining our salinity levels.
On a brighter note, our clean up crew has done an amazing job and we have very little green algae left in our tank (just red and 'grassy' algae now). As we have so many crabs, we've increased how long we leave our t5 lamps on to 8 hours a day and the blue lamp is on for 5 hours- this will also be better for the anemone too.
I also fed our anemone with a small piece of mussel today. Its tentacles grabbed onto it straightaway and it closed up for around an hour whilst it 'swallowed' its food. It's body is now a bit swollen (I'll assume this is because it's digesting its food now) but I must say, I've haven't seen it look this great since we first got it! [emoji5]
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