[Delphinus]

Day 23

Pheh, this is getting a little past ridiculous now.

I don't have a very good nitrite test kit, but I do have nitrate/nitrite test strips, which do at least confirm presence of nitrate and/or nitrite and useful for observing trends but I've found the numbers corresponding to the colour chart to be innaccurate so I don't use the test kit for determining absolute values.

However it does confirm the presence of nitrite in the reactor, and has been showing this for almost a week since I started using it. No reduction in nitrite level, in fact, the colour for nitrite is off the chart.

I last tested nitrate of the reactor at day 18 and it was still off the chart (i.e., >100ppm nitrate). However I wonder if a nitrite reading would throw off this reading. I haven't been able to procure a proper nitrite test kit, if I have time to pop into Gold's on Friday I'm picking one up (all other LFS's I've tried are either sold out or don't carry Salifert nitrite kits). However I'm somewhat leery of spending $30 on a test kit that I'll never again use after this little sulfur experiment...

I expected two outcomes - the first and more optimistic was that this would prove to be viable for me. The second and less optimistic was that it would still work, but the small volume of media I'm using would prove to be ineffective on a 115g overall volume of tank. Frankly I didn't expect at all that it would seem to be incapable of growing the requisite bacterial colonies and be completely ineffectual as a result. I'm now wondering if there is something about how I've set it up, that is incorrect, or perhaps sub-optimal for running a sulfur reactor. I really wish I could see a working model in person .. I'm basically at a loss.

In the last week, I have run two 25% water changes (I don't really have the means to do a water change larger than 30 gals, I don't have a large enough reservoir to make more makeup SW) and that should put the tank nitrate level to approx. 40ppm from the initial 75ppm (75% of 75ppm =~ 56 ppm, 75% of 55ppm =~ 42 ppm), I've also moved my mangroves over and planted them in the remote-DSB, I've also made a chaeto cage and moved some chaeto onto this tank so I'm now throwing all I've got at this tank in an effort to get the nitrates down to a tolerable level .. there is a point of diminishing returns though and I don't mind admitting that I wish this sulfur reactor would kick in at some point. 3.5 weeks and no positive trend yet ... well we'll see where this goes. Maybe it's just me, and it's just not going to work. I'll give it a few more weeks but I guess there's no point in more updates at this point until there's actually a change to report on.