At one point my softies had some troubles. Some of the toadstools wouldn't extend their polyps (the smaller ones), and the palys would stay closed, and the finger leather would go in and out a lot.

I was talking to albert about carbon, and he said not to use a liter of carbon in my tank, because that would "rape" my softies. I discovered the correlation that I was running a liter of carbon when my softies were having problems, and it was probably the thing "raping" them :)

So yesterday I'd cut back on my carbon by putting the HOB filter it's in on a timer to only run 2 hours a day. I'll see how things change in the next few weeks. If nothing changes, I'm just going to leave it that way.

Hmm, thats interesting, as mentioned, I have read several sps aquarists saying that also.

I wonder if its our use of larger skimmers and/or other filtration methods, as compared with filtration many moons ago, when carbon was a mainstay of the canister filters.

I,ve been using it for so long, I would be scared not to but who knows what its doing related to the amounts we use?

well i never used it for the first couple years i kept sps and never had any issues with yellow water or chemical warfare or whatever and that was in a 25g tank.

that's why i originally posted this question...because i really don't see any tangible benefit. with regular water changes, i never got yellow water anyhow. so am i just wasting time and money by the adding carbon?

I would say thats the most important factors in this discussion.

I stopped using carbon in my tank for about 4 months now and wow my softies love it!

I also do regular water changes and have not had to add any supplements, nor have I noticed any yellowing.

I wouldn't say I notice yellowing without carbon, but I do notice an improvement in water quality if I put in new carbon. I'm not sure how long the effect lasts though. It's not really that long, maybe a couple of days tops.

However I would say that it's probably useless to just have carbon passively - you need to drive flow through it. Ie., even having it in a baffle isn't probably good enough because water will just flow around it instead of through it. It has to be in a filter, either a phosban reactor or an aquaclear or a cannister filter.

what improvements do you notice?

The water just seems to be clearer. It's hard to describe. The tank has a brighter look to it.