Long term success without carbon dosing

[RuGlu6]

Originally Posted by reeferfulton

Need some help here .

I have had my tank setup now for 2 months . I have had 5 fish in there now for about 2 weeks .

My nitrates with (elos kit) have been undetectable and still measuring .02 phosphates with the hanna checker.

I have purchased a full setup to run Biopellets , and also have a reactor and GFO on standby as well.

My questions are .

1.IF you Do carbon dose ( vodka , vinegar , biopellets ) when did you start and why ? nitrates where creeping up on you ?

2. Anyone running a lps/sps reef with fish medium stocked long term without any sort of carbon dosing . ? If so what levels of Nitrate are you happy with

feedback would be great .

Seems from the reading I do I am finding alot of people are running biopellets without really knowing why .Thus i am asking what people are doing

thanks

If your tank is new it is safe to start bio-pellets.

Any dosing requires testing, therefore you might get tired of the routine may not sound like a big deal now but eventually you may get sick of the dosing and testing.

I have had a few reef tanks since 1998 and never liked dosing just for that reason.
I always had a Calcium reactor (set it and forget it).

My present tank is almost 8 years old now SPS mostly some LPS and softies.
Tried dosing but for very short period to see any benefit. so i can say i have never fully implemented dosing.

I did tryed pellets on 4 years old SPS reef followed the proper regime to the "T" and still lost more then $450 worth of my best SPS.

So i did not have very good experience with bio pellets and would not recommend then on an established tank.
However on the new tank like yours it would be a lot less risky to try.

My tank is over stocked, over fed and over skimmed.
I have 1 very large (8" French Angel) , 2 large fish (Moorish Idol and Hippo Tang), two small Percula Clowns , one juvenile Coris Wrass and two tiny yellow gobies.

I grossly overfeed my 65 gal+ sump tank (two three cubes some times 4 per day plus flakes, cyclopeeze and lots of pellets) but over-skimm as well and it seems to be in very good balance. Bare bottom with lots of live rock in the display tank and sump as well.

Good luck with your new tank

[Reef Pilot]

I think some people have problems with bio pellets, because they are not using MB7 or some other bacterial supplement. MB7 provides beneficial bacteria which out competes cyano and prevents mulm. It also makes my tank crystal clear.

Also, you need a good bio pellet reactor that tumbles your bio pellets properly.

I have used bio pellets (with MB7) for over a year now, and can say that it works very well for me. My SPS is growing very nicely.

I should mention that I inherited a very mature tank (10+ years) old that was totally infested with algae, cyano, detritus, etc, and phosphates and nitrates were very high. It took me a while to get it down, but now I have zero nitrates, and near zero phosphates. I also run GFO, as the bio pellets did not completely eliminate the phosphates.

Before that, I tried everything else, refugium, vacuuming sand, as well as brushing, turkey basting and rinsing my live rocks, not to mention lots of water changes. It was not until I started using bio pellets (and still took another 3 months) that I finally got my nitrates and phosphates totally under control. So no doubt in my mind that bio pellets work.

The other thing with bio pellets, is that it is very low maintenance. I last added pellets about 5 months ago, and noticed that my consumption is still decreasing. Plus I never have to clean my bio pellet reactor. And if there is a power outage (had one recently here), it starts right up, with no intervention or more maintenance.

But as per my initial post on this thread at the beginning, I still don't recommend bio pellets or carbon dosing on a new tank, unless you can't get your nitrates down with normal good tank husbandry practices.