nitrates nitrates nitrates

[saltguy21]

I have noticed an increase in questions about nitrate. I have a fish only 120 gallon tank with a sand bed about 2 inches. I have a bak pak 2 and a wet dry sump made out of a 20 gallon high tank. I am running the water through floss and enough bio balls rated for 120 gallons. More and more threads are popping up about putting live rock in trhe sump, under water of course. My question is how much live rock and should I run bio balls with it? My inhabitants are a 3 inch porcupine, a 12 inch snowflake eel, a 5 inch lunare wrasse, 4 small blue damsels, and a 2 inch maroon clown. I have about 100 pounds of live rock right now but am about to possibly double that amount. I haven't been using ro water. Any suggestions would help.

 

[bc_slc]

ditch the bioballs. If you have a bunch of them, I would pull out a small handful (maybe 5-10 balls) every week over the next several weeks. I used to think this wasn'ta big deal, till I pulled all of them out of my own tank about 3 years ago and it totally disrupted the system.

As far as how much live rock to add in place, more is better, especially in the sump since you don't have to worry about giving the fish places to swim. i would add ANY new rock slowly, even if it is "fully cured". The one exception would be if it came out of someone else's tank that has been well established, but that doesn't include new "fully cured" rock from a local fish store.

i would also recommend going to some sort of filtered water. This of course depends on what your tap or well water is like, but usually the minerals and electrolytes are not great for a tank, and accumulate as you replace evaporated water.

Mat

 

[NaH2O]

I don't think nitrates are as much of a concern in a FO/FOWLR tank. Are you thinking about the addition of invertebrates?

 

[Peterock]

I have a bak pak 2 filter as well and my buddie told me about removing the bio- balls and over a corse of 2 weeks my nitrates went from 50 to a 12.5. Since you dont have any corals then you should be fine with that. If your sump is a 20 gal then I would add about 15 lbs of rock to the sump. You might want to think about adding 1 inch of sand there as well just to help with things, but if you can take it from a very established tank that will have a fair to good amount of pods so you can possibly have a manderine fish (The coolest little guys around)

 

[cheeks69]

Like Nikki mentioned if you have a FO then I wouldn't be concerned about nitrates they won't kill the fish although if they're real high it will stress them. If you have enough LR then you really don't need bio-balls and they can render your LR inefficient.

One of the things to consider is the formation of biofolms, and mixed layer biofilms. I think that the surface of all inert structures are coated with a two layer biofilm, the inner is comprised of anaerobes, breaking nitrates to N2 and O2 while the outer is aerobes. The aerobes protect the anaerobes and provide the nitrates. Such proximity of growth leads to a remarkably efficient system. This system is negated when we add a wet-dry type filter. In this case the anaerobes predominantly grow on the filter. Since the oxygen is extremely high at the filter they are unable to mask the anaerobes and we get a an uncoupled nitrogen cycle. The nitrates build up.

 

[alizar185]

I've been reading quite a bit about setting up a reef tank and one of the things the "pros" say you should never do is mix live filtration, ie; live rock and live sand with any sort "trickle filter" or bio balls or anything like that. Is anybody big on the idea of a plenum natural filtration set up, I'm planning on going with one. Just a few thoughts.

Steve

 

[NaH2O]

Steve - MikeS on the board has planned on setting up a plenum with his new tank. Also, here is an older thread based on the plenum idea, but it is more plenum wasting rather than the standard plenum. Take a peek - A Sediment Substrate That Works