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melev

A change in biopellets usage

Rating: 6 votes, 4.83 average.
5 Comments
by
melev
, 09-26-2011 at 12:12 AM (5596 Views)
On February 6th of this year, I started running 2 liters of Vertex biopellets in my system, and over that 7.5 month period I was able to maintain zero nitrate and zero phosphate. Granted, my system has a DSB, live rock, a skimmer and a refugium, but so did my 280g reef. I've not had to dose Phosphate Control nor use GFO once with the new tank. And no vodka dosing either. I've only done a handful of water changes in that time. Maybe 600g, possibly.

Two weeks ago, I hooked up a second NextReef SMR-1 XL reactor filled with 1 liter of Biospheres by Coralvue. Now that they are seeded, I removed the first reactor, drained it and collected what was left of the Vertex NP biopellets.

Name: biopellets_used.jpg Views: 1402 Size: 76.2 KB


The used biopellets smelled clean, somewhat salty like the ocean. No sulfuric smell, and nothing looked dirty nor decayed. Of the 2-liters I installed I'm down to maybe 750ml of solid media, probably less. The rest was consumed over the past 7.5 months. I rinsed it out several times in RO/DI water and will dry them out to use later (there is no reason to waste these at $60/l). For now, I want to see how the Biospheres do. I'll be watching the sandbed and of course PO4 and NO3 levels. Here's my previous blog on the Biospheres: http://www.reefaddicts.com/entry.php...res-NP-pellets

Once the reactor has been thoroughly cleaned out, I'll fill it up with some carbon to help improve water coloration and quality. I've not run carbon in three weeks and I can see the difference.

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Categories
‎ Water Chemistry

Comments

  1. RobC's Avatar
    Hey Mark,
    Have you heard whether running gfo is an issue with bio pellets? I have lost an entire colony of frogspawn shortly after I hooked up biopellets (although these were from Bulk Reef Supply)
  2. Eric B's Avatar
    Can't wait to see the comparison between the two different types/brands!
  3. melev's Avatar
    I wouldn't run GFO with biopellets. Rob, how did you have everything hooked up specifically?
  4. RobC's Avatar
    I tried to reply to this right away but the site went down on me, so sorry for the delay.
    I have the biopellets on an reef octopus reactor. I implemented about 750mL at one time (I have a 150 gallon tank). My thinking is that I should have done half of that and then the other half after a month or so. Everything seems to have leveled off now as my nitrates are down to 0 and my hair algae problem that I was battling seems to be going away little by little. Not before I had lost 3 acros, a brain and about 30 heads on my frogspawn. The polyps bailed. I had a Nitrate spike of about 80 ppm and I am just waiting for everything to settle back down before I do anything. I still a few polyps left on a couple of other parts of the tank and I have a few corals, though they seem stressed will likely pull through. I did a couple of water changes and that seemed to help, I think that maybe there were some nutrients between the boipellets, skimmer, GFO and Carbon, that had not been replaced and the water changes helped that issue? I don't know for sure. I am waiting a few more months so see if everything stabilizes and go from there.
  5. melev's Avatar
    You should probably remove the GFO, RobC. Did the frogspawn bail-out heads survive? I've tried to capture tissue like that in the past and put it in a small dish with gravel so they can form a new base rather than writing them off as a loss.

    You had a lot of things running in conjunction, that's for sure. It may or may not be the biopellets that caused that response. Congrats on getting nitrates from 80ppm to 0.