[OceanicCorals-Ian-]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

FWIW, I have run with the pellets both with UV and without. In fact, I am currently running 57w of UV because due to sloppy QT practices on my part I introduced ich to my established livestock (luckily, the UV seems to be helping). At any rate, the nitrate reduction capacity of the pellets does not appear to be diminished.

Having said that, I would prefer not to run UV at all and plan to disconnect it at some point. It is simply a bandaid in the meantime.

Regarding monocultures .. I believe this is a key issue with a few tanks that are not showing dramatic nitrate reduction in the timeframes that others have seen. Plus, nitrate can be bound to substrate (rock and sand), once this happens, it can take a much longer time to see a reduction in the water column readings because as soon as it is removed from the water (ie, by bacterial uptake), it is replaced out of that bound in the substrate. This is not too uncommon, and the solution really is just patience for the most part.

However a bacterial supplement idea has merit. When I started pellets I ran both zeovit and pellets and saw a tremendous reduction of nitrate in a very short order of time. However, I realize now this was due in part to the systems running in parallel and that zeovit requires you to actively dose bacterial strains. When I ran the two systems together, I could test nitrate at the input and at the output of the pellet reactor and could see a noticeable difference (in fact, I would get zero readings in the effluent). Since disbanding zeovit and just staying with pellets, the difference now is more subtle. This makes sense to me: the daily added bacteria was consuming nitrate in a frenzy, but was not a sustainable culture. Thus when stopping the dosing, my tank in fact showed an increase in nitrates and took close to a month or maybe even a little over a month to start showing a decrease once again. Only now about two months after do I get close to zero readings again.

Thus I offer the 2 lessons learned:
1) If you want a faster reduction, you can consider a bacterial supplement such as Zeobak or LB7 or similar product. But ...
2) The flipside is that unless you are comfortable redosing these on a permanent basis, when you STOP dosing it, the bacterial cultures will have to adjust themselves to a more self-sustaining population and this will take more time.
3) The pellets DO work on their own, they are far less troublesome and maintenance intensive than other systems .. the worst case scenario is you may simply need to wait for it to establish. Thus (like with many things) patience is a virtue and all that good stuff.

HTH..

Very well written and looks to be bang on, good call Tony.

Ian
O.C.