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#1
02-04-2010, 07:46 AM
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Have you given the reactor a shake at all? What about the output sponge, is it clean or does it have white gunk in it?
__________________
-- Tony My next hobby will be flooding my basement while repeatedly banging my head against a brick wall and tearing up $100 bills. Whee! 
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#2
02-04-2010, 11:54 PM
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Quote:
Yes shaking every day. Both sponges were thoroughly cleaned on Dec 30, now obviously some debris but still enough flow for pellets to tumble. No white gunk/mulm at all. Also i wanted to mention to you that in one of your posts you say that pellets covering the zeolites with bio film , "what if" hypothetically it is the other way around ... that it is zeolites covering the pellets? Because in my case i have no zeolites and i see no white mulm/gunk... At this point i am seriously questioning the pellets ability to reduce P or N, perhaps in case when they are combined with zeolites they provide food for bacteria that already exists on the surface of the zeorocks. But that alone would not justified the cost, there are a lot of bacteria food around and its not what we want from it. Oh well, another "miracle" will see how it goes. One thing i know that i will not be buying another bag of it any time soon. Last edited by RuGlu6; 02-05-2010 at 12:09 AM.
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#3
02-04-2010, 11:59 PM
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You will not see the mulm in large quantities or at all if the pellets are tumbling aggressively as the bacterial mulm is constantly being abraded off the surface of the pellets. If the were just in passive flow you would likely see large amounts of the mulm being produced. The easiest way to tell if they work is to test your tank for nitrates, phosphate etc. Then test the effluent from the pellet reactor... Doing this test myself the effluent from the reactor has always been zero or close to it.
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#4
02-05-2010, 12:20 AM
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supposedly hair algae should disappear, but it is growing at its regular rate. I only have 4 small fish and one small hippo tang, so no bio load, my point is no miracle, nothing dramatic, no real change. But how else i would learn if not by making a mistake?
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#5
02-05-2010, 12:34 AM
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I wouldn't really expect the hair algae to disappear overnight though. FWIW, I have hair algae growing on the top 1/2" of my overflow slats where the tangs and urchins can't seem to get at it. The problem is that even if you got your tank down to zero nitrates, the nitrates are still being produced, thus the hair algae is a consumer of nitrates alongside the pellets. So at best it might slow down a little bit but it's really going to have to be a long time before it's starved out. (I think, anyhow.)
I would be testing for nitrate to see if it's having an effect. I would be really surprised if it isn't. The mulm production is to me more of a bit of an unfortunate side effect rather than a benefit. Perhaps if the pellets are tumbling and the mulm is sloughed off in small but continuous quantities it's more beneficial but one thing I've noticed is that if the pellets are allowed to settle for any amount of time (even just for a few hours), shaking the reactor to re-fluidize the pellets releases a .. . for lack of a better way to put it .. a crapstorm of mulm in biblical plague proportions. I've had my tank in a total blizzard situation at some points after manual agitations. I'm still trying to find the ideal balance of flow and pellet volumes for my phosban reactor to stay fluidized, it's having trouble staying fluidized, what happens is say half of it gets pushed upwards and clumps together while the bottom half stays fluidized. I might have my reactor a little bit overfull so if it continues I might be looking at upgrading the reactor or worst case maybe reducing the volume inside the reactor.
__________________
-- Tony My next hobby will be flooding my basement while repeatedly banging my head against a brick wall and tearing up $100 bills. Whee!
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