This is a post for the few of you who have nitrate levels coming from your municipal or well water. This is a continuation of a previous thread. My well water has a nitrate concentration of approximately 30 ppm. One practical solution would be to install a R/O system. If I had chosen that path, the system would have to go in my basement. I need about 30 gallons of water a week for my exchanges. I am an old guy and lugging that water up from the basement is not an option. So I plumbed in a nitrate filter into the sink I use for my water exchanges with a python. The filter worked terrific, but it became saturated after two months of weekly water exchanges. These filters cost $119 a pop so that is just too expensive to purchase six of those every year. Next I bought several bags of API NitroZorb and placed them in the various filter boxes. This product also worked extremely well. The resin gets regenerated in a brine solution. And there in lies the rub. After regeneration and replacement into the filter box, the resin releases sodium chloride as it binds nitrate in the tank water. The TDS went through the roof. Now I am trying a nitrate binding resin that also gets placed in a media bag called cobalt total nitrate. This resin can be regenerated either in a brine solution or a 1 to 4 solution of bleach. Of course, after you soak in bleach, you then do a 24 hour soak in a water conditioner to neutralize the bleach. Then you test for the presence of chloride ions to know it’s safe to put back in the filter box. So far this product is also working well. I may be playing Russian roulette with this product given the regeneration in bleach, but if I’m really careful to neutralize the bleach afterwards I may have found a solution. The product instructions state that the resin can be regenerated multiple times. I will update you as I gain more experience with this product. If you hear a loud scream, it will mean all my fish have died.
