Filter socks - good or bad?

[ericarenee]

Can someone explain the "nitrate factory" thing. I believe it but I don't understand it. Why do nutrients trapped in the sock cause nitrates to rise when the same stuff circulating in the tank doesn't? I mean all you've done is change the location of the particulate matter so it can be removed when the sock is changed.

Am I looking at it too simplistically?

The Socks is good breeding ground for converting nutrients into nitrates by bacteria that will live in the socks if you do not change them out very often...
the waste output from the bacteria that get trapped in the fibers are pure nitrate ...
simple answer . but i am sure someone will give a more complex one.. Bleach kills and removes this organic material..

 

[CStrickland]

Can someone explain the "nitrate factory" thing.

The basic idea is that the bacteria get unbalanced. If you have decaying organic stuff (food, poop, dead bacteria, etc) in a place where the flow is high like floss or a sock that water is passing right through, you have a very good place for the bacteria that uses the waters oxygen. That gets the stuff rotted through the ammonia and nitrite stages well, but the bacteria that converts nitrate out of the tank as a gas needs to not have oxygen. In a low flow area, like little detritus piles in the corners of a tank or inside the rocks, they can live right underneath the oxygen users but in these filters things get knocked around too much so they aren't protected.

There's a lot of kinds of bacteria and we don't really understand much at all, but that's the broad strokes of it. It's basically our best guess as to why nitrates go down if you take the filter pads off your tank, or clean your sock.