Originally Posted by
Iminit
I’ve never bought into the nitrate thing. Been many study’s on nitrate with results up to 200ppm and no problem with fish. Thing is people have major problems when told their nitrate is way to high they need to change massive amounts of water. This in turn kills the fish. Thus blamed on high nitrates not the fact that the drastic change in water shocked them to death. If the water is changed out slowly there would have been no problem. For years there wasn’t even a nitrate test in the api kits. Kind of funny the nitrate test appeared around the same time matrix appeared. Than as we all know a great salesman promoted his amazing product that produces nitrate eating bacteria that will remove those nasty nitrates. Yes bio-home media. Come on all of you are using it! I admit I’ve got about 5lbs of it( Hey it’s still a media). But in reality to grow this bacteria you need total darkness and very little oxygen. So once you clean your canister filter (only place it will grow) you kill off most of it and than it takes months to regrow. All grown just in time for a cleaning. On another forum a guy did a year long study. Yes within 6 months his nitrate did start to reduce. This tank had a dedicated canister with a prefilter sponge. It was never opened. After the 6 months and peaking the nitrates started returning.