Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

First, the low dosage for your size tank is no more than 4 ml per day or about 5 drops per day. Is that what you are doing? Then you can drop that in half again in a few weeks.

Also, I have never recirculated my bio pellet reactor, and not sure what that would do. The output has always gone to my skimmer. And I never turn off my skimmer when I dose MB7. Maybe that white goo includes carbon from the bio pellets that aren't being skimmed off.

Like I said before, I have never seen what you describe. In fact, only the opposite, ie the absence of mulm, and very clean reactors. Even my sand and tank in general were cleaner with the use of MB7.

The tank is around 375 gallons when you include the sump, but I was having a hard time figuring out how much is in a 'drop' lol, so I might be over-estimating. When you work it out the low dose amount is 0.1 'drops' per gallon per day, or 37 drops for the whole system volume. I tried counting out drops in to a 10 ml syringe and got 7ml, but there were a few at the beginning which were kind of messy so I went down to 6ml. Is that still too much?

And a recirculating pellet reactor is just one design for a reactor. It lets you tumble the pellets at whatever rate you want them moving independent of the amount of actual water flow through. I'm not sure that the design will ever catch on (I think there's only a couple of brands making them still) but when I set up my tank they were touted as the next big thing. Apparently they solved the problem of pellet reactors stripping tanks of all nutrients when you pushed enough water through them to get a good tumble. They were supposed to let you 'dial in' the nitrate levels proactively, increasing or decreasing the output as needed. You can dial back the actual amount of water that gets processed per minute without risking the pellets clumping. I've had the outlet valve opened to 100% for like a year though so I'm not sure it was worth the added expense. The valves still need to be balanced though, so if the outlet line clogs up, or you reduce the output on purpose, you need to increase the flow on the recirculating valve to compensate, which is why the reactor starts to shut down if it clogs and you don't see it happening. My outlet line still goes directly to the skimmer intake.

And I'm not sure why it's happening, I'm thinking maybe there were more nutrients in my tank than I thought? One would assume that if you dose bacteria in to a system with food for the bacteria, you'd get a bacterial proliferation, which on the one hand is good because it means that the nutrients are being consumed, but surprising at how strong the response is? It's only been a couple of days at the low dose, so we'll see if it calms down. I have to feed A LOT because of that cowfish, which can only increase the amounts of everything.