bolivianbaby

As many of you know, I got a 20 gallon aquarium off of Craigslist yesterday. My nitrate readings were 20 after I re-filled it with water (90%). We left 10% water in there for the two fish.

When I did a 50% water change today to get my nitrates down between 5 and 10, I also cleaned the filter cartridge in used tank water. It had so much green algae on it, it turned the water DARK FOREST GREEN! Not pretty "Kermit the Frog" green.

I thought I'd read here about algae being a cause of high nitrates.

Or is it high nitrates causing algae?

Could someone clarify this for me and let me know if I'm correct about the correlation of the two? I'm trying to learn and this has me mildly confused.

Thanks

Shawnie

hi nitrates usually cause algae....high nitrates are caused by overfeeding, overstocked, and not good tank maintenance...all 3 will cause a jump in algae as well

bolivianbaby

Thank you Shawnie

I'm guessing she hadn't done a water change on that tank in quite a while. And there's no telling what else she'd had in there. She said the reason she was getting rid of it is she had too many, so it may have been neglected.

I'll be updating my aquarium info and adding this tank by the end of the weekend.

The good news is the ammonia dropped from 0.25 to 0 all by itself between this morning and this afternoon, so all we're down to is the nitrates, which I'll be checking again in the morning.

harpua2002

Very cool. A series of water changes will help bring nitrate down a lot, as long as the nitrate is not present in your tap water. Have you tested the tap water?

bolivianbaby

Yes, I did. Tapwater nitrates test at 0. Good thing, too.

Just checked the 20 gallon nitrates a moment ago and we are down to 5.0. I did the water changes about 7 hours ago. I'm going to check them in the morning as well to make sure there are no problems.

Hopefully, I'll be getting my new baby this weekend. I've narrowed it down to a convict or a jewel, but that's as far as I've gotten. Decisions, decisions, decisions!