My Diy Sand Filter. I'm sick of filter socks!!!

Then skimming is truly your best bet. The proteins/waste in the water are not filtered by physical means. You either need a good skimmer, Algae scrubber, Cheato, remote deep sand bed, or large frequent water changes. I think two of those blocks could work for you. Might take 6 weeks but it will start working.


Aaron
 
very nice sir. beyond my skills, wanna make one at my place, free visit to the beach!

is it me or is this a more efficient skimmer. traps crap, flushes crap. removes crap. Repeat

I also have the block but not sure it would handle this.
 
very nice sir. beyond my skills, wanna make one at my place, free visit to the beach!

is it me or is this a more efficient skimmer. traps crap, flushes crap. removes crap. Repeat

I also have the block but not sure it would handle this.

I'm just tapping into its potential. If this thing collects the organisms the feed on the carbon and N&P as good as I think it's going to it'll be even better than I ever could've expected. After thinking about this for a while it could have even more benifets over using a skimmer and carbon dosing. The way carbon dosing works is really quite simple. We feed organisms carbon but they also consume nitrates and phosphate and we export them usually via a skimmer. Thinking about it a skimmer will remove young as well as mature without discretion. My hope and intuition tells me the sand filter will allow the smaller baby organisms to pass thru but collect the larger more mature ones. If it does it could end up being more effective than a skimmer. And without the stink! Lol
 
Here's a question. My nitrates are at about 30 right now. No skimmer running at all. Lots of cheato in my sump. Crazy big bioload. Feed tons. I set my doser up last night to dose 80 ml of viniger thruout the day. what would happen on a regular system doing that? What signs will I get that the sand filter is not effective?
 
A few months ago I installed an ats. As soon the ats was mature and kicked in my phosphates and nitrates went down
They are not all the way down,
But I'm very happy where they stand
The whole tank is happy

Here Is a video watch In HD I You. Can

 
A few months ago I installed an ats. As soon the ats was mature and kicked in my phosphates and nitrates went down
They are not all the way down,
But I'm very happy where they stand
The whole tank is happy

Here Is a video watch In HD I You. Can


Looks great but I got 10 times the bioload. I used to swear by ats but they are a pain. I'm lazy lol. Now I just grow cheato. Way easier. I'm collecting this much about once a month
 
Here's a question. My nitrates are at about 30 right now. No skimmer running at all. Lots of cheato in my sump. Crazy big bioload. Feed tons. I set my doser up last night to dose 80 ml of viniger thruout the day. what would happen on a regular system doing that? What signs will I get that the sand filter is not effective?

Anybody?
 
Here's a question. My nitrates are at about 30 right now. No skimmer running at all. Lots of cheato in my sump. Crazy big bioload. Feed tons. I set my doser up last night to dose 80 ml of viniger thruout the day. what would happen on a regular system doing that? What signs will I get that the sand filter is not effective?



Nothing, 80 ml won't do much just get you started. Increase every 4 days by 50 ml until your nitrates begin to decrease when they are less than 5ppm then decrease to half and maintain. Make adjustments based on you nitrate levels.
 
Here's a question. My nitrates are at about 30 right now. No skimmer running at all. Lots of cheato in my sump. Crazy big bioload. Feed tons. I set my doser up last night to dose 80 ml of viniger thruout the day. what would happen on a regular system doing that? What signs will I get that the sand filter is not effective?

If your question is "how do you know if the sand filter is capturing the bacteria bloom that you are feeding/creating by carbon dosing" then the answer is to see if your nitrates go down over the next few weeks. Carbon dosing doesn't work overnight, the smaller the tank the faster it works, but it still doesn't work overnight (I guess it could if you overdosed carbon, but you'd hurt a lot of organisms by changing the chemistry that fast, even when reducing phosphates or nitrates, too fast is bad).

Even with your sand filter and backflush method, if it is truly working as expected, you should see nitrates go down over the next few weeks. Same thing with your deep sand bed as well.

I think you are going to run into problems with the sand filter. I love the idea, it makes a lot of sense, but my guess is that you will have the classic "bioballs" problem. They work great for neutralizing ammonia into nitrite and then into nitrate, but then they become "nitrate factories". It's not that they're creating nitrate, it's that they're tons of oxygenated surface area, providing a lot of space for nitrification. Deep sand beds should work to remove this (the marinepure ceramic blocks are effectively concentrated squares of deep sand bed), but denitrification is slow. Maybe the chaeto will help and absorb the nitrates and phosphates, but I suspect your nitrites will climb as long as you are using the sand filter, unless you are washing it almost daily. I think filter socks have the same issue.

Also, you may have trouble with the deep sand bed over time too. If any detritus gets down to that sandbed, it will get trapped and eventually fill the DSB with more detritus/nutrient load than it can process, and you'll get what is classically called "old tank syndrome", where the rocks and sandbed cannot process nutrients anymore because they are nutrient-logged from years of detritus and nutrient exposure. The ceramic blocks get around this by not allowing any detritus into it (pore size too small, allegedly, nobody has been running them long enough to know, and the sample size of people with different conditions of tank running them for a long period of time is too small).

Something to consider, and I know it's a different situation, but it's somewhat similar, is that most commercial marine aquariums that have fish-only setups use reverse-flow sand filtration for their nitrification. I know you're not doing reverse-flow, but I think that you'll still have an enormous amount of aerobic surface area for nitrification, which will lead to too much nitrates.

You look handy, why not build a DIY methanol denitrator? Basically long hose in a box that you slowly drip methanol to, which becomes anoxic, and allows bacteria to process nitrate to nitrogen gas. For reference, in the link above, the guys using it have very large heavily stocked with large fish tanks that they are running these on. It's not a tiny tank with mostly corals that are fed limited food. These guys are for real.
 
If your question is "how do you know if the sand filter is capturing the bacteria bloom that you are feeding/creating by carbon dosing" then the answer is to see if your nitrates go down over the next few weeks. Carbon dosing doesn't work overnight, the smaller the tank the faster it works, but it still doesn't work overnight (I guess it could if you overdosed carbon, but you'd hurt a lot of organisms by changing the chemistry that fast, even when reducing phosphates or nitrates, too fast is bad).

Even with your sand filter and backflush method, if it is truly working as expected, you should see nitrates go down over the next few weeks. Same thing with your deep sand bed as well.

I think you are going to run into problems with the sand filter. I love the idea, it makes a lot of sense, but my guess is that you will have the classic "bioballs" problem. They work great for neutralizing ammonia into nitrite and then into nitrate, but then they become "nitrate factories". It's not that they're creating nitrate, it's that they're tons of oxygenated surface area, providing a lot of space for nitrification. Deep sand beds should work to remove this (the marinepure ceramic blocks are effectively concentrated squares of deep sand bed), but denitrification is slow. Maybe the chaeto will help and absorb the nitrates and phosphates, but I suspect your nitrites will climb as long as you are using the sand filter, unless you are washing it almost daily. I think filter socks have the same issue.

Also, you may have trouble with the deep sand bed over time too. If any detritus gets down to that sandbed, it will get trapped and eventually fill the DSB with more detritus/nutrient load than it can process, and you'll get what is classically called "old tank syndrome", where the rocks and sandbed cannot process nutrients anymore because they are nutrient-logged from years of detritus and nutrient exposure. The ceramic blocks get around this by not allowing any detritus into it (pore size too small, allegedly, nobody has been running them long enough to know, and the sample size of people with different conditions of tank running them for a long period of time is too small).

Something to consider, and I know it's a different situation, but it's somewhat similar, is that most commercial marine aquariums that have fish-only setups use reverse-flow sand filtration for their nitrification. I know you're not doing reverse-flow, but I think that you'll still have an enormous amount of aerobic surface area for nitrification, which will lead to too much nitrates.

You look handy, why not build a DIY methanol denitrator? Basically long hose in a box that you slowly drip methanol to, which becomes anoxic, and allows bacteria to process nitrate to nitrogen gas. For reference, in the link above, the guys using it have very large heavily stocked with large fish tanks that they are running these on. It's not a tiny tank with mostly corals that are fed limited food. These guys are for real.

I think I'll see if my sand filter works first. I've had it online for a few months now and my nitrates are dropping slowly but I've got a ton of cheato growing. I'm hoping I can cut back on it and instead harvest these organisms that eat the nitrogen and phosphate. The other thing is it only looks after nitrogen.
 
Here in San Diego that's how the scripps institute filters their aquarium water, also available for free public use. Not course their sand filters are ten feet high and probably contain at least a ton of sand each (there's three). When I lived there I used that water for the reef and never had any problems. I'd love to know more of them mechanics of what's inside those filters so I could duplicate them, but I can't imagine they're that far off from this
 
I was getting all excited about this and saying "Yeah, this would work great!" until I remembered my system isn't near any water lines or sewage lines... (sigh) filter socks for me...
 
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