nitrate

new to this sight...im having problems with my nitrate levels...first of all i have a 30 gallon tank with 2 mating discus in it....a 75 gallon with 2 smaller discus in it.. and a 180 gallon with alot of plants and gravel with about 9 discus in it...all my tanks were doing fine for about six months or so with me doing about 35-40 % water changes in them.i have owned alot of other fish before doing this for about 5 yrs... i just used my tap water for all of them...but after checking my 180gallon tank i had a high ph reading so i added some discus buffer to the tank for a several days which brought the ph to normal....but my nitrate levels in all three tanks are still very high..i have no idea what to do.. to lower the nitrate. the only thing i can think of that i changed was a few weeks ago i went frm 35%water changes weekly to 35 every three days on my 180gallon tank; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it nitrite@0 ammonia@0 This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it advice would be very helpful....ty for ur time....robert one other thing the 30&75gallon tanks are just glass bottoms with no gravel in them,,a couple of plastic plants in them ...they are mainly hospital tanks...

Well I'm no expert like most of the other people on this forum but there can be many many many different reasons for the high nitrate level. But I'm no expert so I'm gonna suggest overfeeding . If not then there may be a lot of debree on the bottom of the tank.

What kind of filter are you using? Are there any lights over the tank? How big are the discuses(plural?). Did you add any new plants
or switch foods?

Also, Welcome to the forum.

Welcome to our forum. From what i know about Discus, the 30 gallon tank is sort of small for a pair. I also know Discus keepers who do partial water changes every day or two. If the pH buffer changed the pH over night, that's pretty fast. Since Discus like soft water, some people use reverse osmosis water for some of the water changes. That may help lower nitrogen, but you may need buffers. You can slowly lower pH by adding Malaysian driftwood and Indian almond leaves. Does the densely planted tank have high nitrogen? If so, it could be in the tap water, which would make RO water a good idea but not very convenient for so many aquariums. If you've been keeping aquariums for several years, you already know that over feeding will raise nitrogen and nitrite. Megan is our Discus expert, and she'll be back in a week or so.

John brings up an interesting point. Have you by chance checked the parameters of your tap water? Sometimes, the water company will put different chemicals into the water, scarey but true.

If you have high nitrate in your tap water, it doesn't matter how many water changes you do, it's not going to go down.

I really love Discus, I don't get to see many, and I really don't have time to take care of any with as many tanks as I already have.

It seems that most people that I know that keep Discus use the daily water change method. I can understand why you are doing them every 3 days, with that many tanks. The bigger tanks are probably ok like that, but I'm betting the 30 would benefit with more water changes.

Hopefully Meg will be back soon and be able to chime in on this...

By the way... WELCOME TO THE FORUM!!!

I forgot. Check out the blog section for more information on Discus.

ty all for ur advice... its been very helpful....