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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 !