Anyone loosing or lost tissue with biopellets?

I was running them for around 4 months and have been off now for 2 weeks. I to was having the "random" spotty STN but only on a couple specific millis, and I attributed it to a crab I found, that was picking on a milli one nite when I woke up in the middle of the nite and wandered over to the tank. Always in random spots. Since being off them now I've seen a slight increase in nitrates, and phosphates but nothing alarming. I have also seen an increase in PE from some corals, but my corals always seemed to have fair PE to begin with.

Colour changes, I haven't seen much but my tank seems to be continuing along the same path it was while running the pellets..as colour slowly returns and improvs on most pieces.

I did however reduce my feeding slighty which is some what problematic as I have anthias which require a fair bit of feeding to keep them happy.

Any major stn/or issues I've ever noticed have all been related to alk swings imop. I still do weekly water changes and am trying to keep my alk swings to a minimum as I find my tank is going threw a transition of some sort where the demands are changing.

The only issue I can't put my finger on now is not related to sps and seems continue even with the removal of the pellets (and was the reason why I removed them (btas not doing good).

The only single thing I can attributive to the removal of pellets and increase of gfo (not sure which to attribute what to) is the decrease in Cyano.. what makes me believe it was the removal of the pellet was that despite the decrease in cyano I'm seeing a slight increase in phosphates. (.03-.06)

As far as alk. I keep it 8 per a elos test kit. (although recently it creeped up to 8.5, and I over adjust my acjr so it dropped down to 7.. currently I've got it back at around 7.5-8 and I'm working towards a solid 8)
 
Warner biopellets nuked (RTN) a huge rose milli in my tank in under a day. None of the other corals seemed to care though (even a blue milli and a Red Planet next to it). The rose milli was directly under the return pump though *shrug*.

I run my alk ~7-8 and I added the full recommended dose all at once (I read later that this is a mistake) running at around (guestimate) 150 gph through a reactor. The other negative reaction is a cyano outbreak where I had none before. The positive I have noticed though was an uptick in coral growth on a few corals and a deeper blue on my nana/valida type corals.

My theory is that when I started up the pellets I wasn't aiming the output directly at the skimmer input and enough material sloughed off that it negative impacted the coral. I had relatively low nitrate (zero on api) to start with and likely higher phosphates (zero on salifert, those tests are worthless though) and it caused a negative reaction.
 
nemeth27 said:
When I was dosing VGV (which has a similar concept of creating more bacteria) I started to have STNing at the bases of my corals. I believe I was dosing too much VGV and almost no nutrients were left in the watter. I stopped dosing right away, fed heavily and did a 20% water change. The STNing stopped and a month later the bases started to grow back. Now everything is growing great again.

I think our tanks can be too clean...meaning not enough phosphates. I had a cyno problem, so I was trying to beat it with VGV and prodibio. I guess in was too much. I haven't gone back to VGV. I'm just using GFO again.

Just my two cents. Hope it helps.
Click to expand...
just out of curiosity, have you tried increasing your water change % or frequency or feed less for a reasonable length of time before resorting to vgv? -assuming your calcium was in check.
Another thing i wanna ask is, if phosphate level increase how long does it take to affect coloration?
 
ive been running biopellets for about a month. Recently I've had corals that I've had for a long time start to RTN at the base and in the middle. I may stop running them now that I bought an ozone unit.
 
I started dosing MB7 and Vertex pellets about 4 months ago. First month everything looked great but still had some Phos issues, wanted to bring it down so i added more pellets, still well within the recommended dosage. a months later i have browning and rtn on multiple corals. thought it was bugs because all perams where in check and nothing drastic was done. stable... so im blaming pellets for stripping the nutrients out or something?????? i cant blame myself::lmao: took the pellets off today. let ya know hoe it goes.
 
I'm also done with the pellets. Colors were great, but started to see some tissue loss. Back to the basics for me with ol' gfo and carbon.
 
So I did my second round nutrient tests last nite, since removing the pellets on 1/16, and I'm suprised to say I'm not seeing much of a change in my water parameters. Nitrates still seem to be within my avg's, and I've seen a minor increase in phosphates that once again was within my avgs when running pellets. Hopefully this should be getting resolved when I switch out my GFO. I am seeing great PE on all my corals, and 0 patches. However I did also remove 2 hairy crabs one of which I caught destroying some millis.

The downside, and I don't know where to lay this on.. My colours are just not that great, they aren't really getting any worse but they seemed to have halted on there improvement path. Maybe it's due to a small alk swing I had. (I hope).

As unless I see an increase in my nutrients I don't see a need to re-add the pellets at this point in time.

Once I can get my alk rock solid again, and get in a good 3-4 week stability run I'll be able to determine if pellets were the key ingredient to my sps colour improvement or if it was just general stability.

(my log files)

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AiJkwwBTLCi7dG12ZFhsTXBGTUFZellSWTZ3QkhiLVE&hl=en
 
Wow. These posts really hit home. I recently went from using Bio-Fuel, and the tank was doing fine, to running the Katalyst pellet. Started with a low dosage, but noticed no change in my phosphate. Nitrates have always been 0, but phosphates have always hovered around .05. I've never had 0 PO4 so I thought going to Katalyst would help facilitate this. No change in the PO4 level so I ramped up the level by 100g. This is when things got bad if not worse.

Random STN at the bases and in the middle of my colonies. Parameters are all spot on and I have no parasites (and I do have an eagle I for those things, ask my reef buddies). So, I've pulled the pellets and added two liters of Phosguard. It's been only 5 days since I've done this so after reading the posts above, there is hope.
 
I dont know guys.....I've been running biopellets getting close to a year and the tank is just getting better and better.

Why would some get exellent results and and others get STN/RTN?
 
gary faulkner said:
Do you dose any bacteria like Mb7 or Special Blend?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Nope. I used MB7 for a while but I havent dosed in a few months....dont notice a difference.

ottoman said:
Do you feed your tank a lot?
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I do feed the corals and fish quite a bit. That is the advantage of the biopellets IMO....you can feed more without raising NO3 and P04.

Just as a side note I also use about 1.5 cups of GFO and 2cups of ROX carbon per month as well. I dose lugols...although I dont know if that does anything. Water changes are about 15% every two weeks.
 
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I know of a reefer having a really bad experience with these bio-pellets. She has 10+ years experience reefleeping, a beautiful 300 gallon reef tank and a 60 gallon specialty reef tank for seahorses. She started the bio-pellet thing about 6 months ago in the 300 and she's regretted it ever since. Several corals have bleached out. She even has a Tyree green toadstool that was once a bright beautiful green but has now turned a ghostly white color. She has all top of the line equipment, apex controller driving it all, and parameters all in check too. The 60 tank never got the bio-pellet treatment and the corals are all thriving.

So, long story short, she removed the bio-pellets just this week and we'll see what difference that change makes in the weeks ahead.
 
chrissu said:
I know of a reefer having a really bad experience with these bio-pellets. She has 10+ years experience reefleeping, a beautiful 300 gallon reef tank and a 60 gallon specialty reef tank for seahorses. She started the bio-pellet thing about 6 months ago in the 300 and she's regretted it ever since. Several corals have bleached out. She even has a Tyree green toadstool that was once a bright beautiful green but has now turned a ghostly white color. She has all top of the line equipment, apex controller driving it all, and parameters all in check too. The 60 tank never got the bio-pellet treatment and the corals are all thriving.

So, long story short, she removed the bio-pellets just this week and we'll see what difference that change makes in the weeks ahead.
Click to expand...

Tell your friend to feed more. Too many people jump on the BP bandwagon without knowing how to properly use them.
 
Keeping it Around 8 KH when possible, But my Salt mixes up at 10KH so every water change bumps it up a little for a few day's. D&D H2Ocean is what i use and like the salt very much other than the Higher KH than i want.
Bill
 
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