cyano

Are you saying that you smelled a sulfer or rotten egg smell. I am not sure what you mean my hydrogen sulfide? I agree that you cannot over dose the pellets, however you can shock your system. The pellets are only used by what bacteria are present which means there are nutrients there to support them. So robbing the tank of these nutrients too fast can cause a decline in certain things like xenia. Also if you are not skimming out the bacteria they can use up too much of the tank available O2. If you have a way of checking your O2 that would help. I wiki'd your H2S and found that it is generally caused by bacteria and low O2 can be the culprit. You do have a large skimmer right?

Morning Midnight, Yeah I smelled what my brain perceived at the time to be a rotten egg smell. I am running a reef octopus 150 skimmer and also my power heads are breaking the water surface so I shouldn't have an oxygen deficiency, not saying I don't but shouldn't. My reactor output is right in front of the skimmer so once again theoretically that should also be ideal.

I am not able to smell today again due to allergies (I probably should consider moving out of the south one of these days) but briefly I have attempted to sniff in here with the tank and haven't smelled it at all. Today still the tank occupants look happy, these Xenia is pulsing about, I have even kept the millepora frags I got in Thursday alive and happy with their polyps out for longer than any other acropora species with the same conditions, normally they would be bleached and dead by now. I have not seen my cleaner shrimp this morning but I believe it may have molted last night so I don't really expect to see him till later today......scratch that Eddy the cleaner shrimp just made his appearance so everything is alive an well.

I don't have an ORP meter of any sort and I do not think I could find one locally for emergency I would like to clarify that this was not a strong overwhelming scent of it but enough to smell, I have smelt H2S in old stagnant water before and it will make you puke, there is questioning what that is, but in that case it was equipment that was off line and away from the tak and the water smelled of it. In this case I smelt the tank water and it did not have that smell I smelt in the canopy, smelt water that was on my hand from the tank, smelt the sump, and smelt what was coming out of the skimmer, also when I took the reactor apart I smelt inside of it and the bio pellets and I did not get even a hint of H2S thats another reason I was unsure if I even had a problem.

......My wife just woke up and.....yes it was something she cooked it was not from my tank, Thank you for the response and help anyway Midnight. Apparently Chinese chives was the culprit in this crime. On the up-side I did some reading and research on H2S and learned some things I would not have known otherwise! but if anyone else does have any suggestions on what to do should this ever truly happen to you and it not be a drill I would still like to know and it would be nice to have that information documented for that poor soul who is running around sniffing all of his fish water and equipment.

I do still have a question, should I go ahead and dump all the rinsed biopellets back into the reactor? or should I just wait it out a bit and add slowly over the next few weeks?

i would re add them, unless you truly don't think you need them?