Giving Biopellets a go...
by
, 08-20-2012 at 02:31 AM (12759 Views)
So I finally decided to take the plunge into bio-pellets even though there are mixed reviews out there. I had been debating it for months and trying to read up on the best way to go about it but could not make a decision. There were just too many options and the reactors seemed endless. Then I saw the larger pellets that didnt need to tumble, so I figured I would give it a shot and ordered two 500 ml Reef Interest bags with a Phosban reactor 550. The reactor had nice large grates to allow good flow and I like the 150 so it seemed logical.
To get these added to my tank, I would need to rework some plumbing. After talking with Marc, the easiest way for me to feed the output of my reactor in to my skimmer was going to be using a new pump for the skimmer. Right now I have everything fed off a manifold and a Dart, but it actually was not enough flow anyways so this worked out well. I still used a manifold feed off the dart to supply water to the Reactor but used a new Eheim to supply the skimmer. This worked out really well as the eheim input casing allows you to easily hook up the output of the reactor to the input of the pump with a small modification.
As you can see here, I took off the center cap of the intake grate and drilled a hole in it just big enough for some 1/2" tubing. I fit a coupler through it and secured it with a small piece of extra hosing. This allowed me to simply snap the hose on to the front of the eheim to send the waste strait to the skimmer. The Reactor came with adapters and valves to make the hookups really easy and after throwing a valve/union on the output of the eheim i was ready to go.
In this last pic, you can see everything hooked up in my sump. Its a bit dirty, I know, but there is a lot down there! The top blue arrow is the feed line for the Reactor off my dart manifold and just to the right you can see the old feed line for the skimmer with the red x. The bottom left arrow is the new feed line for the skimmer where the reacor and eheim are sitting. Overall it came together pretty well, only problem is I have to dial in this stupid skimmer again! I have some Prodibio Bio products I will be using to help get things going and will update with how its working a bit later.