Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have added chaleated iron (so much the water was cloudy for two days) some maxicrop.. Still have 10ppm ish nitrates and yet:

Whats the other readings?

So far 0 ammonia 0 nitrite and ph forever high at 7.8-8.0 I'm guessing I'm going to have to buy acid to get it down - between top offs and two HSM's that required 200gal ish top offs I don't see it coming down naturally

How long has the system been running?

Just over a month - long enough for it to cycle

If you have fish in the system just let it go for a while without adding anything. I had black tips and leaf edges a while back and the general consensus in the end was me adding too much potassium with seasol and potassium chloride (eco rose) spray

Just going on what other people have said, but it definitely looks like a PH problem to me. I'd poke around and see if you can find something that is buffering the PH up before you add any acid though.

The system cycling does not mean PH lowers. My system took probably 2 to 3 months for PH to lower from 7.6 down to 6.(could have even be longer)
Now that the PH is lowered I can do a full water change (not that I try to do this) and PH will go pretty much staight to about 6 over a couple of days.
Dont add acid, you just need patience.
Maybe you dont have enough fish powering your system, my plant growth is a bit yellow and I have put it down to not enough fish and lack of full sun.

My water is buffered so much that acid is a necessity. No amount of nitrification lowers my PH.

A system will also take 6-12 months to really mature and those nutrient deficiencies will diminish. I just added some new beds to my system (maybe 3 months now?) and in those beds some plants are doing okay while other plants are just dying. For instance, I planted three new zealand spinach in the new beds and one new zealand spinach in the old beds. The three in the new beds are dying and the one in the old bed is getting explosive growth. I have corn in both the new and old beds and all of them look fine.

Another thing to note, after adding iron sometimes there will be an immediate improvement, but in other cases there will only be improvement on the newly formed leaves. The older leaves will still have interveinal chlorosis (yellowing of the leaves between the veins).