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 State of the Tank: (cont.) |
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in which they can thrive, the bacteria multiply and go to work consuming the nitrates in the water that continues to slowly pass around them. If this process sounds familiar, that's because it's exactly the same description of what goes on in a well functioning deep sandbed. The difference is that these units are infinitely more controllable and when THIS media gets depleted, you don't have to take your whole reef down to replace it.
According to the directions (which could use a good rewrite by the way), it takes a full six to eight weeks for the sulfur balls to fully colonize and then some time after that for the effect to be noticeable in the tank. But once it does, the reduction of nitrates is supposedly quite dramatic and rather permanent...as long as the media holds out anyway. The layer of coral rubble on top of the sulfur balls supposedly replaces some of the calcium lost during the denitrifacation process and the entire unit is run by an Ehiem 1250 pump. Because of my unit's logistics, I added a little dosing pump to keep the drip rate (2 drops a second to begin, 1 drop every two seconds afterward) constant and to forego the worry of it ever breaking siphon due to an air lock.
Now, for those of you wondering, "What's with all the new toys?" I've got a couple things going on. The first was that I had an unusual "rtn/stn" event last month during which I lost a handful of "SPS" colonies. |
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This, I believe, was due to phosphate poisoning. What made it so unusual was that the event only occurred in a very localized area, actually on and around a single piece of live rock. Unfortunately, that piece of rock had a couple of my favorite corals growing on it so the whole thing was particularly devastating to me. It also made me wonder if, like an old sandbed, liverock can also get 'full' and lose its denitrifying abilities over time. If so, I'm gonna need a quite a bit of help as some of my liverock has been at work for nearly ten years.
The other problem is that my cyano is back. It's not the usual red stuff that has annoyed me before though. This time it looks like this  and is extremely difficult to remove. Luckily, it is not infesting the entire tank, maybe about 10% of it. It is growing primarily in the uppermost center area but what particularly worries me is this area is directly adjacent to the phosphate event area. Oh, and the 'bad' rock had some of this crud growing on it too. So this situation, combined with a little hair algae growing on a few of my return nozzles, has been a great motivational source for me to step up my tank husbandry both in terms of effort and equipment. Fortunately, hair algae seems to be one of Attila's favorite foods, so I'm not too worried about THAT stuff taking over, but clearly I'm having a water quality issues with regards to excess nutrients. Either they're somehow getting in through my RO/DI system |
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