[Delphinus]

Looks great. So is Brent making stuff again? When I wanted to buy a skimmer from him a couple years ago he had decided to take a break .. nowadays I know you can get the designs from Austin Aquatics but it's nice to hear he's back in business. He has some neat stuff.

Anyhow, good luck with this. Like that coarse media .. If I wasn't sitting on I think at least 2 containers of ARM I'd try some .. but I have to use this stuff up.

At least I think I can say I learned something with my sulfur denitrator that I hope can spare you some headaches in getting yours going. Although at one month in now and not outputting zero yet (but output is less than input so that's good) I think that it's good that you've oversized it, because despite that people tell me I should have an adequate media volume, the same flowrate into a larger vessel compared to a smaller vessel will be introducing "less O2 by volume" into the anaerobic zone, meaning hopefully a faster cycle.

I guess I can tell you to be suspicious of your test kits, sulfur interferes with them. Nitrites for sure, so don't bother testing nitrite.

Oh one more thought, Randy Holmes-Farley did this one write up where he sort of explains why the calcium from the second stage should be minimal .. (chemical equations and all), but I can tell you in the 8 weeks now of running mine (between the two "trials"), the calcium media in my second stage has gone down at least 2", maybe 3". So while it's theoretically negligible, IME it's non-zero. I haven't bothered testing alkalinity in this tank though as there is nothing in there that it's a huge concern for (corals can't live in nitrate soup). Just my ritteri anemone.

Which sort of leads me to my question for you though ... in my case, the ritteri is this weird nitrate-producing beast that I've learned to live with. Perhaps a stronger skimmer would help me in this regard but I'm curious what skimmer you're running on your system and whether you've given any thought to upgrading or modifications there (i.e., recirculation, gravity feed from raw overflow water, etc., or even just going to a larger skimmer)?