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Hi I have an issue with my old tank, which is around 3 years right now and the issue is NO3. Currently I am forced to do 25-30% water changes twice a week, and this is just enough to keep the NO3 below 10 (which is still way to high!). I have no idea what is causing the NO3 to raise so quickly as there is just around 50 shrimp and nothing more. The tank is 30L (8 gal), inert substrate, heavily planted, I add no fertilizers. Plants are duckweed, anubias, cryptocoryne, and eleocharis parvula carpet. Two HOB filters - one is sponge, the other one is small sponge + peat + JBL nitratex + seachem matrix (I added two weeks ago, as this thing is supposed to bring down nitrates, but so far no results). For water changes I use salty shrimp GH +, Azoo Triple Black Water, Azoo Mineral Plus(every second week) and Azoo Ph Down, to adjust the pH of the water that goes into the tank with what's already there. As for bacteria I add seachem pristine, and seachem stability once a week around 2ml of each. Feeding is once per 2-3 days, small amounts that gets eaten in a few hours. So I had that issue already around 5 months back and what I did is bought the JBL bionitratex and added duckweed, and it did solved the problem but to get a good result I had to use two bags of the JBL product for a single tank (the product comes with 4 bags total). Now this thing is quiet expensive imo for the time it lasts, so I would like to ask for any other options to keep the NO3 in check, as the plants are clearly not able to handle that. From my observations - there is a substantial amount of muck in the substrate, but since the tank is heavily planted I cannot vacuum it. If needed I can provide some pictures of the tank. Your help greatly appreciated !

Hey SKF, I've recently started adding 2ppm of nitrates to my weekly/fortnightly waterchanges as my tank constantly had zero nitrates and my plants were looking hungry. The product I use is cal aqua labs green. I'd like to know what people's experiences or opinions are on whether small amounts of fertiliser can be added to shrimp tanks WITHOUT dripping it in slowly (as in a typical waterchange which is what I'm currently doing) In other words; if I directly dose the 1 or 2 ppm worth of nitrates to my aquarium without slowly dripping it into the tank would it have any negative impact on the health and/or breeding of crystal or tiger shrimps? love n peace will

Hi Guys, My nitrates continue to read above 20, sometimes 40 and I have no idea how to keep them down. All other parameters are fine ph 6.2, 0 ammonia, 0 nitrites, 2kh, 4gh, 195 TDS (it has crept up a bit too much for my liking). Anyway some simple things for you to know is that my tank has a layer of frogbit, I do not overfeed (feed every 2nd or 3rd day), weekly 10% water changes using RO water, I also have boss mineral balls, IAL leaf, Benibachi zero, golden vine with xmas moss, 1 aqua clear hob filter and a biospon 56l dual sponge. I do not want to go down the path of using peat moss, I just want to be able to control the nitrates naturally. I would appreciate any thoughts - my plan of attack this weekend is to do at least a 25% water change (this takes forever to do when you are dripping the RO water back in to the tank) and was going to clean the sponge in the HOB filter.