Before and after biopellet photos. How do I bring my montipora back to life?

[whatcaneyedo]

My carbon and GFO come from BRS. Both were purchases a year ago, the GFO is the regular granular and the carbon is fine lignite.

I believe that over depletion of nitrate and phosphate was the case too. However I do feed my tank heavily. 1/6 nori sheet daily, Formula one pellets 3 times a day (amounting to 1/2 tsp I think), a cube of PE Mysis 3 times a day and a 1"x2" slab of silversides or krill every second day.

[Zoaelite]

My guess is they are too far gone.

Your system is clearly doing very well, time for some new frags . I had the exact same problem when my ALK was raised too much while running the pellets, lost that exact same green cap and burned the crap out of all my tips.

Biopellets went in the garbage alllonngggggg time ago.

[Reef Pilot]

Wow, and I thought I was a heavy feeder. Surprised you can keep your nitrates down with that.

I have seen pics of your tank,... very nice.

[Casey8]

Originally Posted by whatcaneyedo

My carbon and GFO come from BRS. Both were purchases a year ago, the GFO is the regular granular and the carbon is fine lignite.

I believe that over depletion of nitrate and phosphate was the case too. However I do feed my tank heavily. 1/6 nori sheet daily, Formula one pellets 3 times a day (amounting to 1/2 tsp I think), a cube of PE Mysis 3 times a day and a 1"x2" slab of silversides or krill every second day.

whatcaneyedo, you are my friend I don't think you are overfeeding them. They are just like humans. If you feed me once or twice a week, I still survive but am I happy ? I don't think so ! Maybe I can maintain my weight without needing to hit the gym everyday
Anyway, I used to run bio pellets for about 6 months and the last couple months I had used, it almost killed/bleached all my sps corals. Since I switched to Vodka dosing, I can say I am happier than ever before. No algae, phosphate or nitrate. I don't even need to clean my front glass everyday like I used to. My cheoto cannot even grow an inch bigger in a month.

[Reefie]

Have you tried dosing Potassium?

My Monti Caps were getting bleached and weren't growing and I read on the ZEO forum to try K-Balance.

I was on the full ZEO, but have switched to the Vertex Bio Pellets about 2 months ago.

Since then they have coloured up and are growing new ridges.

http://www.jlaquatics.com/product/zv...m+-+250ml.html

I only dose half the amount because I dose some other ZEO stuff.

It might not hurt to give it a try?

[raceit]

Hey Guys, so you I read on the forums where some guys are talking about the water being stripped from bio pellets. How do they determine this, what numbers are they looking at?

[tang daddy]

I have ran biopellets in my tank for over 1 yr with no I'll effects, however I found that running the high efficiency gfo from BRS stripped the water so fast that I lost a few acros aswell as brown outs in my others. After removing the H.E. Gfo things are back to normal.

There are some reports that bio pellets can cause cyano and other bad things like hair algae by releasing nitrates back into the tank. Some of this maybe true..... Although they do work and work well.

There have been numerous discussions about running biopellets and some say the return of the pellet reactor should go to the skimmer so that the waste can be skimmed out while others will say it should go near the return pump so when it breaks down can feed corals aswell as the fish.

I tried feeding mine to the return pump and had cyano algae from time to time, recently after a long discussion and looking at the display tank at JL, Jeff swung my decision and got me to reroute my bio pellet return to my skimmer. To my amazement my skimmer produces 2X the skimmate and it's very thick nog. Also no more trace cyano anywhere.....

I must say I am very happy that I talked to Jeff as he always has a wealth of knowledge and is always up to par with the newest equipment, also I run an algae scrubber that I am extremely happy with. Running the biopellet and algae scrubber in unison has given my tank a great combo for stripping nitrates and excess phosphates from the tank in a slow form that won't shock the sps.... Also I would like to add that I do dose Brightwells MB7 to introduce a newer bacteria culture every 2 weeks.

Hopefully you don't through biopellets out the window, maybe it was the gfo that stripped the phosphates so fast that yourmontis suffered, a few members have stated that gfo strips water clean fast which is why on a smaller system like mine I decided to go with a more natural route....

[Bblinks]

Couldn't agree more, nice post dude.

[whatcaneyedo]

Theres just one problem with that theory for my situation. According to my written records I've been using GFO steadily since 2008. In 2008 when I first tested phosphate in my tank it was .75, then with rowaphos I slowly made it undetectable. Since then I've maintained it low by changing out 1 cup of BRS GFO every month or two (My system contains about 240gal) In May 2010 everything looked the best it ever has and I received TOTM on this forum. In August 2010 and then again in March of 2011 I removed the GFO briefly and tried Biopellets. The first time it was 350ml and the second time 100ml. In each case I experienced bleaching immediately among the soft coral and then the montipora shortly after.

The Biopellets reactor wasn't discharged towards the return pump, just into the sump. My return pump draws about 2000gph and the skimmers pump might draw around 1000gph (PM Bullet 3 with Iwaki 70RT). So that could have been a contributing factor. However I think the main reason was that the tank was already an 'ULNS' with excellent growth, colour and undetectable nitrate and phosphate before I added the pellets. The pellets then stripped the last bit of Nitrate out which caused the coral to bleach.

I'm too Dutch to throw anything out so I sold the biopellets last year.

As I stated earlier, I had my system dialled in and running perfectly... then I tried to fix what wasn't broken... and then broke it so to speak. Now I'm trying to get things back the way that they were before the pellets.

[Bblinks]

I guess if that's the case, the pellets made the tank become ultra ultra LNS and if your alk was a bit elevated it can cause bleaching as this is what I experienced but what I don't get is given the length of time the pellets were online I don't think they will be colonized yet so I really can't see it being anywhere near functional unless you were boosting it with mb7 or zeobak or some other alternative source of bacteria. Since every thing is doing well again I think its best to just leave it alone. Stay with the good old fashion rowphos and carbon.

BTW I do highly believe in running your alk at a lower level when you have low nutrience, it just seem to be easier to cope with for sps since they don't have too much nutrition stored.