Carbon - Yes or No?

[Delphinus]

Originally Posted by reefwars

come on theres got to be a buch of people who dont use carbon so its a fact that its not needed

This line of reasoning is flawed. The real question is how long do those tanks last, that are setup without carbon use? If the goal is simply to eek a tank out for a few months to a year and then move on, then sure, maybe you can get away without carbon use, but that doesn't mean that there wouldn't have been a benefit had carbon been in there also.

I know there is some speculation between a link of excessive carbon use and HLLE but as far as I'm aware there has not yet been any causative link established, just speculation. And frankly, HLLE isn't that well understood anyhow. To me the definitive pros outweigh any speculative cons.

Read the article I linked, it has some informative insights regarding accumulation of organics over time that can't be skimmed out. Doesn't it make sense that "old tank syndrome" has a cause that could be conceivably related to that? What about allelopathy? It's not just softies tanks that are susceptible to this. Carbon can alleviate the effects of this.

What's the adversion to using carbon?