Hello,
At the current moment I have about 2 bags of charcoal in my sump as filtration. Up to about 2 months ago this seemed to be effecient. Now I am getting rising nitrate levels and ALOT of green hair algae growing in the substrate and on my LR. I was going to remove the charcoal and purchase some bio-balls to put into the sump. Figured switching out the filtration medium might work. Any thoughts on this?
The sump came with a grid and drip plate for bio balls but wasnt in use when I got the tank from a friend. It's a 95 gallon, 100lbs. of LR, very low bio load, just 1 sailfin, 2 domino damsels and one yellowfin damsel. I had crabs and shrimp in there but they croaked for unknown reasons after being in the tank for about 3 weeks.
My nitrate levels are around 60-80 everything else is well within limits.
At this point I am willing to try a different filtration in the sump to try to bring the levels down, just wondering if removing the charcoal and adding bio balls will cause a tank crash.
I feed the tank 1 cube of lifeline every other day, and a little bit of flakes on the days I don't feed them lifeline.
One more thing to add that I thought of, I think my bulb on my UV Sterilizer may have burnt out, its a coralife turbo-twist and I noticed that the light isnt on anymore that would always be on. Perhaps this is the problem? or does that have nothing to do with nitrate problems?
Any ideas?
Thanks!