Poret Foam - Possible denitrifyer

[president89]

I use 1" thick poret foam blocks to split up 33G long tanks to keep multiple clown pairs without building permanent walls. Alot of amphipods live in the foam and presumably eat alot of the uneaten food. Being that I feed these clowns with the intent to spawn, there is alot of uneaten food. I do have a basic sump, skimmer and some liverock. I almost never bother to test the water. The fish are healthy, and I change water weekly, so I never saw the need to. I eventually threw an algae scrubber on there because I heard they were good, but i wasn't getting much growth. I decided to test my nitrates. I tested it just to see what the readings were. I was VERY surprised by the results. I had 10 ppm nitrate when I was feeding the equivalent of 5 cubes of food per day. Is it possible that the poret foam is acting like liverock, hosting live "stuff" that removes nitrates from water (or absorbs it as I understand live rock does). This seemed to be a biproduct of my design and was not my intent at all.

It's porous, live animals live in it, I am pushing a good amount of water flow through it constantly - around 400GPH.

I'm not claiming it does, but what do others think? Is it possible?

If you don't know what it is, google poret foam. It's produced by swisstropicals.

Here is my basic tank and the flow of water.

 

[ReefsandGeeks]

I'm not sure how well it would work with the water flowing through the foam. The flowrate would likely have to be unrealistically slow. With live rock, or matrix the flow mostly goes around the rock, allowing time for the oxygen to deplete and get to the anerobic stage that denitrifying bacteria work. I'd think the chances of it denitrifying would be better if you just had a block lay horizontal on the bottom of the tank, that would have very little through water. you can of course always test your nitrates and see if they are out of hand.