Keeping Nitrates Down In NPS Tank

[Romulox234]

After Reading about uhuru and his kalk reactor constanly supplying his tank with food ive decided that if i ever set up an all azoo tank then thats definitly what i will do too keep them well feed, but i was wondering how you guys get rid of all the nitrates and waste and everything in your tanks, ive heard you say you you zeovit or some other kind of bacterial removal device but what exactly do you mean can you provide a description of how you have it set up?

 

[Amici316]

IME a denitrator is key and the most effective way of exporting NO3-. You must keep any eye on your alk though.....

The good thing is they are easy to build and fairly inexpensive.

 

[aninjaatemyshoe]

First of all, you have to consider both nitrate and phosphate for the overall nutrient removal. Both are going to build up like crazy in any system that uses continuous feeding to maintain azoox corals. Personally, I don't think there is any single solution to keeping nutrients in check. Here are the main necessary components, in order of importance:

1. A well-established stable system. This goes beyond the simple nutrient cycling that you have with normal reef tanks. IMO, the greatest key to success with azoox corals is to have the system adapted to the high nutrient load before loading it with corals. This means feeding the system the amount of food you intend to feed before adding some of the more difficult corals, like dendronepthya or non-photo gorgonians. Adapting the system beforehand is crucial as it will not only give the bacteria and flora/fauna time to establish, but it will also give you time to get a handle on what it takes in terms of the other components to keep nutrients in check.

2. A high-performing skimmer and some sort of carbon dosing. Many people seem to believe that a skimmer is counter-productive to a system where you are constantly adding food. The idea is that the skimmer will remove the food you add. While this is true, it is besides the point. The fact is that if the food reaches the skimmer, it has failed to be eaten by the corals. Since we are by and large adding dead food to the tank, there is really a small window of opportunity for it to be eaten by the corals right after it is added to the tank. If it is not eaten soon after being added, it will likely settle in some part of the tank to decompose and increase the N and P. Furthermore, the addition of a carbon source, such as vodka, is a very effective means of removing N and P. Carbon dosing requires a skimmer to remove the excess bacterial biomass.

3. Very good flow. This is already a necessity for maintaining many of the azoox corals in terms of feeding. In addition, high flow also helps prevent the accumulation of heavy detritus in the tank, which would otherwise quickly form into a nutrient sink. For my own part, I use two Tunze 6055's and a Nano Wavebox for my 30 gallon display tank. The wavebox is very good at agitating the substrate and dislodging any settled food. I would recommend one for any non-photo tank.

4. Water Changes. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to go with a nano-sized non-photo tank. To keep nutrients in check, I perform approximately a 75% water change every week. If I were to go with a large tank, the cost in salt would be rather prohibitive. I do not perform the water change all at once. Instead, I use two dosing pumps to remove old water and add fresh saltwater. The way I have it setup, it is simple and hassle-free. These water changes have been very helpful in keeping the nutrient levels in check. If anything, they allow me to be much more carefree in terms of how much attention I pay to water quality. As it is, I measure my nitrate and phosphate levels once a week and I've been able to keep them low to undetectable. I am not sure if I need this high of a water change and, at some point, I plan to gradually decrease it and see if I can keep the nutrient levels down.

5. Refugium. This basically speaks for itself. I use one both as a way to eliminate excess nutrients and as a breeding ground for copepods/amphipods/etc.

These are the most important things you can do to keep nutrient levels down. I wouldn't try anything else in lieu of these components. However, there are other things that can be added:
-An algal turf scrubber - a promising device, though I've never used one, and they seem like a lot of hassle and take up a lot of room.
-Ozone generator - people have reported positive results with these and they might have the benefit of breaking down allelopathic compounds from the water. However, I don't think they do anything for nitrate and phosphate per se.
-Lanthanum chloride - a strong and rather cheap phosphate remover. The precipitate the compound forms with phosphate should be removed, so it takes special consideration to use this. Also, it should be used with careful attention to both N and P levels. I would only suggest it in cases where the phosphate levels are much higher than the nitrate levels as a way to balance things.
-Denitrator - As with the lanthanum chloride, this has the shortcoming of only handling one of the major nutrients, in this case nitrate. I suppose that you could combine lanthanum dosing with a denitrator to handle them both. However, I have a feeling that the amount of nitrates going through these systems could quickly overwhelm all but the largest denitrators. As stated before, alkalinity must be monitored, but that is something that should be done anyway. This wouldn't really be a bad thing to try if all else fails.

As a final point, there is one thing that should be avoided in terms of nutrient reduction: chemical media. This includes carbon, GFO, purigen, etc. The fact is that there is simply too much nutrients being processed in these systems for chemical media to be effective. Any of these media will be used up very quickly, rendering them as impractical and costly solutions.

 

[rowjimmy]

^^^EXCELLENT post! Thanks for taking the time to break that down ninja. :thumbsup:

 

[Romulox234]

Wow that is a lot of work, i definitly need to do a whole lot more reading before i ever attempt an azoo tank, thanks for taking the time to explain that all to me i greatly appreciate it

 

[aninjaatemyshoe]

No problem, glad to be informative.

There is no doubt that azoox tanks are a huge undertaking and a big challenge. I would definitely never recommend one to someone that doesn't share my obsession for this hobby, nor to anyone that doesn't have a good deal of "normal" reefing under his/her belt. That said, if you take my approach, most of the work is in the setup of the tank. The day to day maintenance is actually no worse than any other reef tank I would say. However, I try to automate just about everything I can. I don't trust that I could keep up with many of the things needed for my tank if I had to do everything by hand. With that in mind, I have definitely spent way more than I should in this hobby for various equipment - and I am an equipment junky.

 

[Romulox234]

As you said we feed our tanks already dead food and if it isnt captured in that slim window by the corals its doomed to fall somewhere and decompose but would feeding the tank live food such as brine shrimp, rotifers, mysid shrimp would that help to avoid the problems of excess nitrates and phosphates? This would also give the corals more chance to capture food and simulate a natural environment better.

If it could be done would it have a significant impact on the water changes and params and just all around maintenence of the tank?

 

[aninjaatemyshoe]

In most cases, live food is better than frozen, freeze dried, etc. However, it is also significantly more labor intensive. You also tend to be quite a bit more limited in terms of quantity and variety. I know that I cannot possibly hope to raise live food to the amounts that I feed on a daily basis. For the labor, space, and equipment needed to have a significant source of live food, I don't think it is practical as anything but a supplement to frozen food for most of us. Of course, if you could switch to an all live food regimen, you would definitely see a decrease in the nutrient load, if only because you wouldn't need to load the tank with as much at a time.

I think if there is any live food I might try, it is live rotifers. Ever since attending a talk by GreshamH, I've been interested in doing this. They seem extremely easy to rear and could potentially be a great staple food for my tank.

There is one source of live food that can potentially provide a significant source of nutrition for your corals: the microfauna that already grows and reproduces in your tank. These are the copepods, amphipods, mysid shrimp, etc. that come in as hitchhikers. I have heard a number of stories of people having huge populations of these guys. In my tank, I have a pretty large population of amphipods and mysid shrimp. I used to have a ton of copepods, but I think the amphipods and mysid shrimp have either out-competed or simply eaten the vast majority of them. Whether or not this high population will be sustained in the long run is yet to be seen. I will say that I have yet to observe my corals eating one of them. Perhaps they catch them at night...

 

[Romulox234]

I wasnt really that all the live food cultures would be that labor intensive i was more imagining it on a small scale such as maybe a 2g bucket of rotifers,brine shrimp and other live food but i guess that this not a reality and that it would have to be on a much much bigger scale to have any sort of effect

 

[herring_fish]

Keeping Nitrates and Phosphates Down

Keeping Nitrates and Phosphates Down

I am just getting back into this hobby after relocating so I don't have much to show but I have gone in a very different direction that has work for me for years.

I was always interested in filter feeders. When I started, there weren't the foods that are available now and there wasn't a blueprint for successfully growing these corals. Never the less, there has been a path for easily exporting nutrients and phosphates and this is the standard Algal Turf Scrubber (ATS). They can be fancy or simple but they work quite well.

Although they have been around since the early 90's and before, they have been slow to gain acceptance for a lot of reasons that don't have anything to do with their merit. When I read Dynamic Aquaria by Dr Adey, I had only been in the hobby for less than a year so I didn't have any tried and true methods that I could fall back on so I learned the hobby, making my mistakes within this paradigm. Now I am very comfortable using an ATS.

I re-started my tank one year ago and I have been slowly building up the capacity of my tank, just as aninjaatemyshoe suggested. I only added some dendro relatives a month ago and I got my first carnation two days ago.

All that being said, I completely bomb my tank several times a day with food and still can't get a test kit to read anything but zero. My rock is completely clean and I don't do water changes. My old tank was only bombed once a day, just before the lights went out but I put so much food in that you could not see any corals in the tank at all. By the next morning the tank was clear.

You can see my and last months corals in a couple of videos of the tank setup with the dump bucket and fug by clicking on these Youtube links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRoKX8AjEbI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARl3jzpVd0g
The splash is just for fun.

You can also see my website with some old articles that were published on my last project and some renderings by clicking on this: http://asaherring.com

Refugiums, with macro algae in it, are getting popular as a fall back or as an additional piece of the puzzle to help control nutrients but it is understandable that many people would not want to trust so much on something like this but it does work. It would be hard to go from something that you know works to something so very different. One of the other problems is that if you run both paradigms, they compete with each other. They work better as an "either or" system.

Since both systems work well, I will just say what I like about what I have chosen. Basically, it is simple, easy to maintain and reliable. I also like the idea that there isn't any mechanical filtration at all. That means that I can put food in and it circulates for a long time. If I set up my foods right, they do not settle to the bottom of the tank or sump for a very long time and the bacteria, and critters take care of the rest. That is why I have build up slowly to where I am now this new year. If there is anything left over to rot, it will immediately be taken up by the algae as fertilizer.

If this thread is about controlling N and P then this works...and it's simple. I only have a lights, pumps, lots of rock and sand in a refugium and a scrubber. That's it!

 

[aninjaatemyshoe]

It seems like a lot more people are trying the ATS route nowadays. After looking at a few more examples of people's ATS setups, many of the designs seem a lot simpler than I have seen in the past. Many of them seem to consist of little more than water cascading down vertical screening with a light shining on it. Most of the ones I'm familiar with are like yours and employ some sort of dump-bucket mechanism. I was never that interested in building or implementing a dump-bucket. For one thing, my tank is in my room, and I would not be able to sleep with the noise. But, if these simpler setups are really effective, they seem like a pretty good thing to try. Is there an advantage to having the dump-bucket style?

The funny thing is that I have something very similar to these simpler ATS's in my tank. I own a DSA Neo Nano, which has a waterfall-like return that is designed to keep the surface of the tank calm. The waterfall catches light from the one LED spotlight I have in the tank. Sure enough, I grow algae on the waterfall and need to clean it regularly. Before I just considered it a continuing nuisance, but perhaps it is doing a good job eating up extra N and P...

 

[herring_fish]

My first tank had that same dump bucket paced right on the top of the tank like you see in the rendering on the left but I wanted the splash to be much bigger and I find it relaxing. …but if I leave the hood top open in the living room, I can't sleep in the bed room. With it down I sleep great on the couch right next to it. Also, pods fall out of it without going through a pump.

No, you don't have to use a dump bucket at all. It does increase the efficiency of the unit by as much as 50% because it gets water to each strand better but you can make up for it by having more surface area. You do need to have a lot of light though. An ATS can be designed to be just about any shape and fit into any orientation.

The biggest down side of a scrubber is that you normally have to design and build your own because the original design was patented so hardly anyone make them for sale. There are guidelines that should be followed like how much surface area per gallon in the tank and how much light to use. Sometimes and ATS gets a bad rep because someone tries it without knowing anything about it.
Go to:
http://www.algaescrubber.net

You can find all that you need to make a cheap simple design like a “Scrubber in a Bucket”. The most popular one there grows algae on both side of the screen. Use those curly compact florescent bulbs that you buy at the store and use around the house (my idea) ….unless you want to cool down the tank temperature. Then you would use a hot light, like a halogen, to cause evaporation (also my suggestion…from Adey's book ) and it is made of PVC. You clean it once a week and that's it.

Another hard part is just disconnecting all the other stuff that you have because once it is up and running, it will not work well if you have a bunch of other stuff taking up all the fertilizer before the algae can use it.

It won't come on line in 24 hours so keep testing until you get completely tire of getting only clear test water.

 

[ReefMonger]

www.algaescrubber.net has alot of good info

Here is my ATS. Im only into week 2 of it setting up. This is 3 days after my first light cleaning

 

[herring_fish]

Nice

Nice

Yea, it was easy a cheap right...and ...and simple to operate right?

Looking at those hot lights, I bet you do a lot of replacement water. Are those salt spots, from evaporation, on your lamps? In the summer time, if you put a fan on that, the temp will really drop in the main tank.

How many watts are you running? It looks like you have enough surface area. 'looks like your water flow is good as well. Good job.

Are you running a refugium as well? I found a source for bottom dwelling critters so when the Florida temp rises I will buy a bunch of stuff for my fug and the main tank. The good thing about it is that it is cheap.

 

[ReefMonger]

Yes it only ran about 60 dollars for the materials minus the pump.

The salt spots are from some errant spray. The bulbs arent too hot as they are the powercompact variety.

I am running 2 32w bulbs equiv. to 90 watts 3000k floodlamps
I have 500gallons per hour going through the scrubber with a mag 5
I am not running a fuge. I am only running the skimmer and ATS

 

[Romulox234]

If this is really as effective as you ll say then maybe some time down the road ill give it a shot, but currently im pretty happy with the results of my refugium but if i ever upgrade then id definitly give it a try

 

[herring_fish]

Yea don't through out what works.

 

[uhuru]

I use a big skimmer, daily water changes and ozone. I love the ozone. Soon I'm going to connect a big fuge to my tank.

 

[herring_fish]

uhuru,
PM sent

 

[ReefMonger]

I stand corrected. The bulbs are 15w equiv. to 65watt