Nitrite, Nitrate & ph levels in fish tank?

Change more water....

The nitrate is the end result of the nitrogen cycle and any ammonia or nitrite gets converted into nitrate by your filters.

Ignore the pH, you will cause more harm than good by messing with it.

Just do extra partial water changes to lower the nitrate. Avoid BIG changes as the sudden change on water conditions may shock the fish, so do a series of smaller ones each day untill you get the nitrates down.

Ian

There are some ways to reduce nitrates.

Most important is not to feed excessively, every bit of feed you put into an aquarium will raise the nitrate level at some point. So overfeeding is a big contributor to a problem.

Then there are ways to reduce the nitrates you have.

1. Water changes. This of course will also have effects on pH.

2. Grow plants. The plants use the nitrate as food. Sometimes other nutrients especially iron limit growth so you may actually need to fertilize the plants to have them grow enough to control nitrates. The plants will also need to have sufficient light. That varies a lot by plant.

I'm not sure which plant species will work with gold fish, so I can't help you there.

At some point, the plants become large enough that you start to take parts out of the tank. There long term needs to be a balance between what goes in as food and what comes out as plants.

Those would be the realtively easy common ways to reduce ntirates.

Salt water aquariums often need to go to more extreme measures to get or keep nitrates very low. Water is often treated by reverse osmosis so no nitrate at all is added.

Then they will have what are called protein skimmers. Protein contains nitrogen so those machines serve to harvest nitrogen from a tank. I've never seen one used in a freshwater tank, I suspect they don't work in a freshwater tank.

Another thing that can be done is to create anaerobic (no oxygen) conditions, either in a filter, or in the tank. Most common is to build a deep bed of sand. Deep in the sand where orgainisms run out of oxygen they turn to nitrate as a source and so the nitrate becomes nitrogen gas.

Lastly, you can make an algae filter. That is, you pump water into a container, have a substrate in there, basically a plastic screen, for algae to grow and so you harvest the nitrate with the algae. Strong lights are used in the filter to promote growth. You regularly remove much of the algae getting back to harvesting the nutrients from the system.

That's all the ways I can think of right off the top of my head. Anything past reducing feeding, changing water and planting some plants that goldfish won't eat is probably more problem than it is worth.

Marv