I heard these work awesome. But I also heard that once all the nitrates are sucked out, the bacteria within the media will not have a sufficient food source and basically starve. In other words, you can't really keep one of these babies going for a long time as you'll essentially just be pumping CO2 into your tank.
Also, once you remove your nitrates and your media "dies", you need to go through another cycle (where you have to wait a few weeks to get the effluent's nitrates back to zero) to get it alive and recharged again.
I think for short term, you can't beat using these to remove nitrates but not for long term. I believe that's why these aren't as popular as they really could be if they were a long term solution.
|