125G Fish Only Tank without live rock?? Opinions Please

The amount of posts totally contradicting each other in this forum and hobby in general is astounding.

Thats what books are research papers are for, you by no means should listen to all of the misinformation that is spread across all forums saltwater related. It's by no means all misinformation, but there is plenty of it out there.
 
You have just said that a cannister will not be enough as there won't be anywhere for the nitrifying bacteria but then others have said it will actually overproduce nitrate due to it's superiority at harbouring the bacteria.

You're confused.
Nitrifying bacteria is what breaks down nitrates.
A canister filter left unattended will collect detritus which will create an overload of nitrates. The canister would need to be cleaned regularly to avoid this.
Nitrifying bacteria = good. Nitrates = bad.
 
Whoa! This got big quick! lol

Bottom line, a canister ALONE wont work.

Now I misunderstood, apparently the OP wants rock, just not LR. It that right? If so, that's perfectly fine! From day 1, dry rock begins to become very much alive.

But as many are saying, there has to be another means of filtration other then a canister. Rock, sump, etc etc.

That canister will harbor great amounts of bacteria!! It will be awesome! Until it collects to much crap, and you have to clean it. Where does that bacteria go? Right down the drain. Which is why you HAVE to have another means of filtration, because when the bacteria is taken out of the canister, what will filter the water? Sure, there is bacteria in the DT itself; but the tank is used to filtering with all that good bacteria in the canister. Which you just destroyed after cleaning it.....


Always love newbies dealing out absolutes to others lol.

:lmao::lmao::lmao: From your lips to God's ears!
 
You do know we WANT that bacteria in the tanks right? That is the same bacteria that is in the rock that is part of the bacteria cycle breaking down ammonia.

Considering I have been keeping aquarium for 20+ years I probably know lol. But it is not as simple as "we want bacteria and we want as much of it". There needs to be a balance between aerobic and anaerobic bacteria. Otherwise the nitrogen cycle will have a solid dead end at nitrate.

Canister filters generate very large flow over a media that is designed to be populated by very large number of bacteria. For the filter OP listed, we are talking about 900GPH over 1.5G of media volume. So you end up with a bio filter made up entirely of aerobic bacteria. There is no way anaerobic bacteria can live in an environment that has that much of oxygenated water turnover. On top of that, with that much of flow, everything is sucked into the canister and basically "rot" into more nitrate. That is why they need to be cleaned very often for SW tanks and they are not designed to be cleaned very often, so it is a pain to clean a large canister filter every week or so.


These are not problems for FW tanks that canister filters are designed for. Nitrate is not a big issue for FW fish to start with. Most FW fish are very tolerant of nitrate (talking about several thousands of PPM of nitrate) and even if you want to reduce it, you can throw in some plants that would suck it up like a sponge or you can make daily 50% water changes that would take less than 10mins. For my FW tank, I drain it to the garden and fill it up with the garden hose. So draining 100 gallons of water and filling it up takes about 10-15mins :). To change that much of saltwater, I would probably need to start preparations 2 days ahead.

This is the reason why canister filters were abandoned in the early days SW fish keeping. They were replaced mainly LR filtration and designs like Berlin sumps or ,in large systems pressurized, sand bed filters. All these designs have aerobic and aerobic regions, so you can have both type of bacteria.
 
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Ok I feel you can use the canister filter as said before and yes as others said it will become live rock however I'm guessing you mean live rock as in the algae they mean it with the bacteria. Trust me a canister filter would be more difficult to use and you can't get away with huge pod populations or anything but it will work. :)
 
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