Bio pellets do they work?

luk81a

New member
I have used bio pellet reactors before and have found poor results for reducing PO4 and No3. Do many people use this media in sps systems? or stick to phosban and carbon (resin) or vodka dosing.
 
I took my fuge off line in favor of bio-pellets about a year ago. They are better at getting the NO3 down than the PO4, so I redeployed my GFO Reactor. Now I have both a GAC and GFO reactor along with the bio-pellets. I was dosing vinegar, more to mediate the pH from my daily Kalkwasser dosing, but since it is also a carbon source, it was causing a lot of brown bacteria "snotties", and I stopped using it.
I have a mixed reef, but it's predominantly SPS corals.
 
Yes they do work. They help to reduce the overall nutrient load and allow you a wider set of parameters to operate within to control nutrients through feedings of both fish and coral. I use some GFO and Carbon as well. If my pellets tumble do rapidly, I do get some cyano. Better than OD'ing on vodka though - the pellets are truly low maintenance in comparison. I would recommend for an SPS set-up.
 
Ok thats why I had cyano when I was using the pellets. For one my skimmer wasnt big enough but also my pellets were tumbling quite rapidly. But after a day they would clog up, and now think that I cant get the bloody things to tumble nicely, so I gave up on them. Maybe the two little fishes phosban ractor isnt designed for bio pellets even after I tried modifying to get pellets to tumble. My LFS guy said to try out the vertex reactor will pellets looks much better design, Im just so confused as to what way to tackle this. Was thinking that the bio pellets wont reduce my PO4 and No3 to the 0.00 parameters for a sucessful sps tank. So go oldschool and use carbon and phosban.

I have the two little fishes phosban reactor to run GFO. Should I get another reactor to link up together but run carbon before it flows into the phosban reactor? When you run activated carbon, do you have it running permantly? or on a timer? I heard that carbon will pull all the major & miner trace elements out?

So I was looking at Organit R from Brightwells. Its an organic absorbtion resin.

Does not actively remove trace, minor, or major elements from aquarium.
May be used in conjunction with, or as a replacement for, activated carbon.

Any comments or experience about using carbon and/or the product I mention in reactors would be great.
 
Pre-soak your pellets, and do the knitting yarn mesh at the top, but not the bottom, mod in your phosban reactor. At the beginning, they still may clump but if you tap your reactor daily it will eventually stop. I use one for biopellets, and one for carbon/GFO, the biopellets one has no more than a MJ400 as I recall:

You can see about one quarter of the reactor here, crappy pic.
SetupShots-8.jpg


You can see both here:
SetupShots-9.jpg


Edit: Don't fill up the reactor too full with pellets, they will clog - about 1/4 to 1/3 full should be enough!
 
reactor

reactor

So do you run carcon and phosban in the one reactor? so can I run carbon all the time or will it pull out all the trace ellements as well?
 
Yes, carbon and GFO together in one reactor. I run it 24/7. I don't know about it pulling out trace elements... but theoretically if you are doing regular water changes, you'll be replenishing any trace elements that are being removed.
 
Ok thanks. In the reactor what do you put in first (at bottom) and do you sperate the carbon and phosban with foam pads?
 
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