Donovan's Nitrate Destroyer

I use an Apex and a BRS doser pump, but you can do it on the cheap for probably under 50 bucks. You would need one of the cheap peristaltic pumps on eBay and a digital timer outlet that has enough granularity. And if you couldn't find one, you could dilute the vodka to match. It's possible no doubt

One of my wishlist on ebay, but building half dozen of LED lights for customers has to be done first. I will build one once i havebthe time. Controlling the pump shouldn't be a problem as i still have unused pin on my arduino uno. Thanks for the info.
 
I have started raising the vinegar dose in my reactor, Hopefully this is give it a kick start, If this reactor is sucess then I am going to build one with 10" Diameter pvc x 40" high, I is left over pvc piple from previous project..

I don't see any reason for the reactor not to work. As long as the flow is correct, chambers are seeded, porousity of media will host various bacteria according to dissolved o2 content in the water. After much tought of it, thicker or bigger media in chambers might be an issue as there is not much surface area for hosting bacteria. It will succeed eventually but might take longer than expected. That is the reason i use small and medium bio rings and balls, sandwich between coral rubbles, and seachem denitrator on the last few inches of the output chambers. I will take a picture of media i use later today. Cheers!
 
I don't see any reason for the reactor not to work. As long as the flow is correct, chambers are seeded, porousity of media will host various bacteria according to dissolved o2 content in the water. After much tought of it, thicker or bigger media in chambers might be an issue as there is not much surface area for hosting bacteria. It will succeed eventually but might take longer than expected. That is the reason i use small and medium bio rings and balls, sandwich between coral rubbles, and seachem denitrator on the last few inches of the output chambers. I will take a picture of media i use later today. Cheers!

Media I have used is 1" in size but it is very porus due to pores in the media, Very similar to marine pure blocks, water runs through the media so it has ton of surface area for bacteria to grow, I think issue was the flow rate and amout of vinegar dosing I have been doing, I have decreased the flow rate out of the reacotor and increated the amount of vinegaer dosing to the reactor, I will go back home from my trip Friday eve and I will check the effluent readings form the reactor to see if they have dropped, I will post results accordingly, What do you think of large reactor out of 10" diameter pvc x 40" high? I have all the material sitting in my back yard, Total water volume is close to 700 gallons..
 
700 gallons?. That is huge sir. Is your existing destroyer runs on this 700g?. If yes, than you should go with 10" reactor to test it out. I suggest you try sandwiching the existing 1" bioballs with coral rubbles. Balls loosely arrange will have a lot of voids in between them. I also believe the changes of flow pattern due to media layering and bacteria type at different depth of media is contributing to my success. Maybe you can try all these if you are building a bigger unit.
 
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700 gallons?. That is huge sir. Is your existing destroyer runs on this 700g?. If yes, than you should go with 10" reactor to test it out. I suggest you try sandwiching the existing 1" bioballs with coral rubbles. Balls loosely arrange will have a lot of voids in between them. I also believe the changes of flow pattern due to media layering and bacteria type at different depth of media is contributing to my success. Maybe you can try all these if you are building a bigger unit.
Don do you thing for higher volume systems, will be better to make the chambers wider instead of lengthier? Increasing the overall length, so you can increase the flow into the chambers, won't be better than just wider chambers?
 
Greg, i think going propotional (wider and longer) will perform better. If wider, but shorter oxigen usage might not be that high, hence reducing anaerobic zones. I think for ravi case, bigger and longer are the only way to go. His volume is 10 times bigger than mine.
 
Greg, i think going propotional (wider and longer) will perform better. If wider, but shorter oxigen usage might not be that high, hence reducing anaerobic zones. I think for ravi case, bigger and longer are the only way to go. His volume is 10 times bigger than mine.
Or maybe multiple reactors....?
 
Yup, multiple will do if you have space for it. Another thing to consider is the extra work to maintain multiple unit :)
 
I have built protein skimmer out of 12" diameter pvc that I am currently using on my system, I love this beast and it holds 38 gallons of water and stands 6" tall, I am going build the 10" diameter x 39" high chamber that wille be filled with ceramic porus media and I will sandwitch this 1" media with coral rubbles, I will post pictures of the reactor, I need to find the top threaded cap for 10" pvc and threaded coupling, But I will post the pictures this build
 
pictures

pictures

Here are the some of the pictuers of the tank and sump when I was setting it up. Size of the tank is 48"x48"x 32 high (~350 gal) + 34 gallons overflow and sump is 42"x 44"x26" high (275 gal) I am adding another tank that will sit next to this sump which is 200 gal that will hold all my mangroves and pods, deep sand bed and miracle mud, with no fish so that pods, glass shrims, amphipods etc can grow freely and seed my disply tank (in theory)
 

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Yes Sump is already there with ton of rock and other 200 gallon tank will be and other tanks they are will be plumbed with the display tank..
 
Was at one of my destroyer user (LFS) yesterday, delivering another 3 units for installation some hundreds miles away. Managed to snap pictures for sharing

<a href="http://s1233.photobucket.com/user/djbon73/media/WP_20161117_11_03_30_Pro_zpsdn3rkhtr.jpg.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1233.photobucket.com/albums/ff398/djbon73/WP_20161117_11_03_30_Pro_zpsdn3rkhtr.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo WP_20161117_11_03_30_Pro_zpsdn3rkhtr.jpg"/></a>

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Nice, do you have e the pictures of the mdia you have used for thse reactors, I want to make sure that I cget correct media for my large reactor.
 
Here are the medias i use.
 

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I found a mistake I thought I'd share. New to tanks this big, and the skimmers associated. When adjusting the output of the skimmer, I thought "open" was the max flow through the unit, and would produce the most skimmate. But I kept getting dark dark skimmate, and after a while even 5 ml of nopox would cause a bacteria bloom. I didn't realize that running "full open" also meant the lowest water level, which was producing the driest skimmate possible. After a while my tank started to look like heck, lost a couple drags and I haven't seen a pseudochromis in a couple of days. Now that I figured out how do dial in my skimmer, I'm back to dosing full strength and not seeing any blooms.

Long story short, it's imperative to have an appropriately sized skimmer, dialed in correctly, for this effort.

For reference I have a SWC Mini Cone S, and there's nothing mini about it
 
I found a mistake I thought I'd share. New to tanks this big, and the skimmers associated. When adjusting the output of the skimmer, I thought "open" was the max flow through the unit, and would produce the most skimmate. But I kept getting dark dark skimmate, and after a while even 5 ml of nopox would cause a bacteria bloom. I didn't realize that running "full open" also meant the lowest water level, which was producing the driest skimmate possible. After a while my tank started to look like heck, lost a couple drags and I haven't seen a pseudochromis in a couple of days. Now that I figured out how do dial in my skimmer, I'm back to dosing full strength and not seeing any blooms.

Long story short, it's imperative to have an appropriately sized skimmer, dialed in correctly, for this effort.

For reference I have a SWC Mini Cone S, and there's nothing mini about it
I am skimerless and I am currently dosing 3ml NOPOX, increasing it 0.5ml every 4-5 days until I see lower no3 at reactor outlet comparing to DT, without any bacteriaI bloom until now...... I thing that if you increased slowly the carbon dose , skimmer is not a must! But Im watching it carefully, hoping bacteria will only multiplying inside the reactor.
 
I am skimerless and I am currently dosing 3ml NOPOX, increasing it 0.5ml every 4-5 days until I see lower no3 at reactor outlet comparing to DT, without any bacteriaI bloom until now...... I thing that if you increased slowly the carbon dose , skimmer is not a must! But Im watching it carefully, hoping bacteria will only multiplying inside the reactor.



I don't think this will work, we remove the nitrate and phosphate from our aquariums via skimming out the bacteria that consume it, if you're not skimming then the bacteria will just die and release the no3 and p back to the water. I'm 90% sure this is why I stalled. Now that I'm skimming correctly, I'm getting N output from the reactor and my tank looks normal again. I lost the pseudo, and the Tomini tang was acting really strange, like swimming up and down over and over. I can't say why, but now that I'm skimming correctly, everything is normal.

I think I just had an exceptionally large bacteria population that was consuming something the system needed, be it O2 or trace elements i don't test for.
 
I don't think this will work, we remove the nitrate and phosphate from our aquariums via skimming out the bacteria that consume it, if you're not skimming then the bacteria will just die and release the no3 and p back to the water. I'm 90% sure this is why I stalled. Now that I'm skimming correctly, I'm getting N output from the reactor and my tank looks normal again. I lost the pseudo, and the Tomini tang was acting really strange, like swimming up and down over and over. I can't say why, but now that I'm skimming correctly, everything is normal.

I think I just had an exceptionally large bacteria population that was consuming something the system needed, be it O2 or trace elements i don't test for.
What you described, is what happens when someone dose garbon in his tank.....but we don't :-) we dose carbon inside the reactor, where conditions favourable =very low oxygen, to denitrifing bacteria ,exist. We want to reduce NO3 ,by anaerobic bacteria, which convert it, when there is no oxygen, to N2. So if we increase slowly the carbon dose, the population of anaerobic bacteria will increase will increase inside the reactor, consuming luckily all the carbon we dose! So no bacteriaI blooms ,no increased skimate, nothing......if the carbon dose increased slowly with increasing population of bacteria in the reactor, following! In my case this was what happened until now, because I only noticed a slight cyano increase in DT, probably because some carbon escape through the reactor the first days, but now cyano is less than ever in last 10 months, because obviously bacteria increased in the reactor and compete with it for.... everything:-) until now I didn't measure any difference in no3 , between reactor and DT ,because probably the anaerobic bacteria didn't reach a satisfied population to "do the job" . So since I didn't notice any ill effect, I will continue to increase slowly NOpox dosing in the reactor, until I see a No3 difference.
 
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