suphew

I might setup one up just to try it out for interest. But I have been thinking about my problem (mainly cyno, but a small amount of GHA) and am thinking the problem is more likely phosphate than Nitrate, (BTW neither is measurable in my tank). I would be interested in any ideas from you layton for lowering phosphates, I have read a little about using kalk to lower phosphate but don't really understand how this is done or works?? I currently have pretty much no sand, feed pretty lightly, T1000 skimmer which I'm happy with, and run phosphate resin in a fluidiser, tons of water movement (2x6100, UP7 return, 2x 1060 closed loops).

But he hasn't drawn me a graph yet :lol:

Ok, how about this, are you will to admit that there would be (significantly)less detritus getting into the sand bed using this system over a normal DSB? Do you also agree that this system would allow you to remove the sand bed and replace it as regular maintenance (say yearly)? Therefore, even ignoring the other benefits (like no algae on/in the sand bed, no extra bioload, etc) doesn't this all but eliminate the chances of the sand bed crashing from nutrient sink overload? So to conclude is cheap and simple to setup, likely to work well for what its designed to do (NO3 reduction), and low risk?

Yep, all the bacteria would have died due to lack of oxygen so you get the double hit of losing your main biological filter plus a large amount dead matter breaking down. What type of filter is it? I used to use fluval filters and found that typically one side would get dirtier first then as that side reduced its flow the other would catch up. How often do you clean you filter? You don't need to clean them until the flow starts to reduce, having them full of gunk is a good thing its more area for bacteria. Also when you do clean it, most of the time you should only need to clean the sponges, these are there as mechanical filters and stop the larger pieces of gunk getting to the biological media (bioballs, noodles, etc)

Do you have access to rotifer cultures? Getting these is a big problem for us, a few of us have looked into breeding saltwater fish but most easily breed fish (clowns) need rotifers for the first few days or they starve so we end up leaving the babies in our tanks and they become fish food.

Yeah, there was a bit of conflicting information on how much flow, most seemed to suggest as much as you could have without blowing the sand out. But there was a suggestion that you measure the NO3 going in and out, then increase the flow until until the NO3 out starts to rise. But either way as long as the flow is high enough to stop anything settling on the sand I think it would be ok.

All our tanks are run in the mid 20's. Don't think anyone would be willing to adjust the temp to see if there A. did better :lol:

It depends on there age/size, bristles don't show until the are 2-3cm

What would there be to vacuum? The filitering and high flow is there to stop most solids from settling on the sand. Of course this isn't an obsolute, but if setup correctly there would be so little it isn't worth considering, this and swapping the bucket out every year. If you trying to address the whole cycle, then yes, but this setup is to only address the final stage, nitrate to hydrogen sulfide. The bacteria that do the nutrient reduction (here I'm talking about, ammonia-nitrite-nitrate) are different to to the anarobic/anoxic bacteria that this environment is targeted at. Again I'm not talking about obsolutes, there will of course be a small amount earlier stages going on.

Hi Dan, I have a smallish rock in my sump that has some nice ones on it. You can take it away if you like, they are pretty hard to remove without just ending up with a lump of mush, plus tend to pull back into a hole if you go near. I work on the terrace, but would rather not have to take a rock and water into work, any chance you could pick it up from Tawa? If you can figure out a good easy 100% way to kill them I reckon you could make a fortune.

More importantly how long has the tank been setup? Normally you shouldn't have any nitrite that you see on your test. Since you are getting a reading, either your filter crashed because of the power cut and is cycling again or something else has died in the tank and you haven't found it. Did you clean out the filter after the power cut? It's proberly too late to worry about it now. If you can't find anything dead in the tank treat it like it is cycling again, keep up the large water changes, if you have another tank you could think about moving some of the fish and lowering the load in this tank.

But whats your point? Of course there is going to be 'some' phosphate that gets there as well, when have there ever been obsolutes in reef keeping? The point of this system is that with the filtering and no light, pods, high flow, etc, the possible nutrient sink aspect is significantly reduced so that it doesn't need to be a serious concideration.

I would still aim for the bigger tank, the more water you have the easier it is, which is why it its generally recomended to start with at least a 4foot. Maintenance isn't huge if you can keep your load low, the biggest temptation is to change things all the time, but they run far better if you leave them alone. Off the top of my head your weekly tasks would be, water change (this would need to be larger at first, but as the tank matures you can cut back a lot on these), cleaning skimmer, fresh water topup daily (you will also need a supply of pure water, tap water is no good), adjusting your water parameters (if your only going to have fish and soft corals this will mostly just be your PH), water tests.

Wouldn't it be a male if it had bristles?

No, not at all, from Anthony Calfo... "it is a modest strategy and dependant on bioload of course. But so cheap to employ, and easy to remove if you don't like it. My LFS finally tried this with a 55 gall tank full (nearly to the top) of sand with a good stream of water traversing the length of the tank. It was staggering how fast it reduced nitrates on a nearly 2K gallon system. A 5 gallon bucket with a 60lb bag of sand filling it can do similar/remarkable work on say a 90-120 gallon tank. A larger plastic garbage can (kitchen size... 20 gall or so) with a couple hundred lbs of sand, etc. The goal here is denitrification and buffering (if using aragonite). There are not many other benefits... and not many risks either. Unlit and with a strong stream of water over it, its a fairly brainless application Cover it and keep it dark... there is little to maintenance to speak of for it. You can imagine that with the good water flow (key) or even mechanically prefiltered water... there is no way for this to practically become a nutrient sink, as the small fast volume of water cruising over it do not allow the settling/sinking of much solid matter over time."

So many questions! 250l is a good size to start out with. Unfortunately with salt water simple normally doesn't equal low maintenance. A lot of the complex gear used is to save having to do maintenance, like water changes, dosing of additives etc. There are a lot of good HOB skimmers around that would be ideal for what you want to do. Cardinals are great fish, I have a school of 13 pyjama cardinals in my tank. However you can't mix pyjama and bangii cardinals, they will fight to the death. "what do I look into first?" haha everthing, the best way (and maybe only) to success is to do plently of research first, you will also save a lot of money doing this. "What is the best salt...?" IMO the salt in the sea, why pay for something you are surrounded by. The box of salt I got before I realised I could use seawater cost me $120 to make up about 600l, you can do the maths yourself to see what it's going to cost you to do your water changes. "Will I have time...?" No because even once you get the maintenance down to a good level you will spend all your time looking at the tank. "How are cardinals?" great see above "Is it worth it?" Yes it sure is, unless I sit down and make the mistake of working out how much time and money I have spent. The biggest thing you need to decide now is what you want to keep. If its just fish, then it is a bit cheaper, the water doesn't have to be quite as good, lower light is ok, etc.

Maybe I should have been clearer on the application of this system, it is purely for the removal of nitrates by providing anarobic and anoxic environments while avoiding the problems of a standard DSB, like it turning into a nutrient sink and being actually in the sump.

Ideally you want to export the nutrients rather than leave then in the system where one way or another they could cause a problem in the future, in the case of a DSB there is really no way of knowing when the sink will become full. This may or may not cause it to crash, but either way it would need to be removed. Doing this without releasing all the rubbish into the tank can be difficult, and even if you can do it, the sudden removal of the DSB, then waiting a month for the new one to fully kick in is going to cause issues. Filtering the input and the high flow might not stop all the nutrients getting onto the sand bed but it will signifcantly reduce the amount so that it could be run for far longer periods with out having to worry. In the thread quoted a lot of people thought it was similar to a fluidized sand filter, but this isn't the case at all, the idea is to have the in and out feeds both on top of the bucket/container the main flow of water doesn't go through the sand at all, if fact there is very little if any water movement in the sand bed.

Nice, I'm glad someone else is trying it. I currently don't have any sand in my system, I sucked out the 1cm or so I had in my display a month ago, to see if it was causing my cyno problems. BTW the cyno regrowth has slowed down since removing the sand. Agreed, but the shape of the container isn't limited to the typical round bucket, I guess a long trough shape would be better. Also its a bit hard to compare the two because an in tank DSB will have all sorts of stuff sitting on the surface reducing the water contact surface area, algae, microalgae, rock, etc.

I feed mostly flake, and freeze dried shrimp, frozen every week or two. Have you tried not feeding the angel frozen food for a while? Most of my fish wouldn't eat flake etc when I first got them, it usually only takes a week or so of being hungry and watching the other fish eat flake before decide its not so bad after all.

At the risk of starting an ugly thread again (please try and keep it nice) I have been reading a very long thread on reefcentral about running a DSB in a bucket, known as a remote deep sand bed (RDSB). I don't have any measurable NO3 in my tank, but do have some hair algae and a cyno problem, so there must be something there. I'm assuming that it is being used by the algae before I can test for it. So I'm concidering trying this out. The idea is very simple, very cheap to setup, and being remote can be removed easily. To summerise the very long tread, there are a few significant differences between a DSB and RDSB that address usual potential problems. 1) The RDSB is setup with no light, usually in a closed container. The idea behind this is to stop algae and diatoms etc growing on the surface, this stops the sand clumping or the top layer becoming sealed. This means two things, first there is no requirement 'critters' in the sand bed to keep the top layers turning over. secondly fine sand can be used. 2) Because there is no need to support life in the RDSB the water fed in is filtered, either by mechanical filter on the input, or by using the skimmer output to supply it with water. The affect of this is it stops the RDSB becoming a nutriant sink, therefore eliminating/reducing the risk of it crashing. 3) Very fine sand is used, two reasons for this, it increases the surface area in the sand, and it reduces the likelyhood that any nutriants that get in are able to work their way down in to the sand bed. 4) The depth of the sand bed is limited only by size of container used. The thread recommends at least 8 inches, but there are larger setups using plastic rubbish bins with a couple of feet of sand. 5) A highish flow of water is used through the RDSB, the reason for this is the same as in your tank, to stop detrious settling on the sand. 6) The system can be 'tuned' and maintained, instead of using one large container 2 or more smaller containers can be used, allowing you to add more containers to increase the NO3 reduction, and containers can be removed and the sand replaced on a cycle (suggestion is yearly) so there isn't a sudden drop in NO3 reduction if you decide to replace the sand. Here is the link, it is very long and a lot of the same questions being asked over and over by people who can't be bothered reading the whole thing. http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=595109&perpage=25&pagenumber=1

Cal reactor and kalk

Info in SCWD's according the scwd mfr web site: http://www.3iqventures.com/index.html The max gauranteed pressure rating is 5 PSI. The flow rate chart the list only goes so high: Flow into SCWD Switching SCWD Output Efficiency Duration 150 gph 90 gph 60% 22 seconds 180 gph 120 gph 65% 16 seconds 240 gph 180 gph 75% 12 seconds 270 gph 210 gph 80% 10 seconds 330 gph 240 gph 80% 9 seconds 400 gph 360 gph 90% 7 seconds 600 gph 540 gph 90% 5 seconds 720 gph 660 gph 90% 4 seconds

Yeah should get round to doing mine, can you type a quick set of instructions?? I haven't done it before.

The down side to this is they only have push fittings I used to get some salt creep from the joints on mine.