Sulfur denitrator experiment

[Delphinus]

Update - I'm taking mine offline as soon as I have some time to get on my hands and knees to undo the plumbing and clean out the reactors and recover whatever media. In the meantime it's not hurting anything so I'm leaving it there but it's definitely no-good.

About two weeks ago I finally gave up hope altogether this would ever work out for me, so I decided I'd take it offline at the earliest opportunity (but left it on in the meantime since it wasn't hurting anything ... not doing any good, but not doing any harm, so I figured it could wait until I was looking for something to do).

Anyhow I stopped testing my effluent on Feb. 20. Sometime between then and yesterday the input line vapour locked and the siphon stopped so there was no flow. When I discovered this I did a nitrate test of the water in the reactor, and lo and behold I got (for the first time since NOVEMBER) a zero nitrate reading on the water inside the reactor.

So, I thought I'd give it one last kick at the can. Restarted the siphon and reset the drip rate to one drop per second.

24 hours later (tonight), the effluent is back up to 20ppm. (Tank is 35ppm.)

So ... I guess that's it. I'm done with this for now. My guess is that there's just not enough media, despite what people keep telling me that "its enough media" I think the numbers just tell a different story.

Psyire, how much media do you have in yours? Can you do a volume calculation? Even just a rough guess, like "1/2 container of LSM" or "3/4 container" or "2 containers" or whatever is fine. I'm just curious to see how it compares - you said your reactor was much bigger than this reactor so I'm curious as to how much bigger it really is.