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New Zealand Marine Aquarium Society - Wed 6th July - 6:30pm


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:lol:

after seeing the data, i really couldnt say one is better than the other. obviously there were indications of one working better than the other at various stages of cycling but after (about 30 days?) they both panned out exactly the same. it was nice to see the test was done with a number of tanks (was it about 30 tanks?) over such a massive period of time (a year and a half I think?) and how they added ammonia to simulate excrement from live stock etc. also how they took out any bias by using a guy who didnt know what the tests were about. also good to see they didnt use one specific test kit. of course there were several points that could be argued against, such as the size of the tanks were only nanos (i wonder if much larger tanks would actually have made a difference?) but all in all, intriguing information.

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?

Does no one else see the irony in this?

You see one article saying that after reading one artice people belive it, so you belive the one article saying don't pay any attention to single articles as that doesn't mean they are nessessaryly true. According to the one article.

Pie

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You see one article saying that after reading one artice people belive it, so you belive the one article saying don't pay any attention to single articles as that doesn't mean they are nessessaryly true. According to the one article

No, what they are saying is people say "Oh, they put a DSB on Freds tank and guess what, it worked. That means it works for all tanks".

The bottom line was Every tank is different. There are so many variables that can cause one system to work well where as other will crash. To prove their statements, they had created a lab experiment with DSB's versus Plenums and posed the question "which is better?". However, instead of just creating a single DSB tank and single Plenum tank and doing the test over a week, they had a fine sand DSB, they had coarse sand DSB, they did a mixture, then they did 3 tanks of each type, then they did the same with plenums, all the different types, etc. They ended up having quite a number of tanks, all the same sizes, all in the same room, all water sourced from the same location, all using the same test kits, etc etc. They added exactly the same amount of ammonia (8ml daily I think?) to simulate bioload in each tank (amongst other things) at the same interval then measured the results of ammonia, nitrite, nitrate and phosphate, salinity, alkalinity, pH (and some others) via test kits DAILY for (from memory?) 18 months.

Then they graphed the data. You could see that the differences for each system varied only slightly in the majority of cases (although alot with nitrate - fine sand worked much better immediatly than coarse) but then after 28 days, all figures worked out identical and stayed that way for sometime.

He is performing the same test with corals in the tank next to see if they have a differing effect on the same tests.

As I said, interesting to see. I would personally summarise what I got out of it as:

"what works in your tank might not work in mine" :D

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