What is best media to place in wet dry filter?
- Thread starter edmund36
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Stuart60611
New member
Mixing rock and biomedia is really not a good idea and often counterproductive. From Randy Holmes Farley:
5. Remove existing filters designed to facilitate the nitrogen cycle. Such filters do a fine job of processing ammonia to nitrite to nitrate, but do nothing with the nitrate. It is often non-intuitive to many aquarists, but removing such a filter altogether may actually help reduce nitrate. So slowly removing them and allowing more of the nitrogen processing to take place on and in the live rock and sand can be beneficial.
It is not that any less nitrate is produced when such a filter is removed, it is a question of what happens to the nitrate after it is produced.
When it is produced on the surface of media such as bioballs, it mixes into the entire water column, and then has to find its way, by diffusion, to the places where it may be reduced (inside of live rock and sand, for instance).
If it is produced on the surface of live rock or sand, then the local concentration of nitrate is higher there than in the first case above, and it is more likely to diffuse into the rock and sand to be reduced to N2.
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/issu...t2003/chem.htm
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5. Remove existing filters designed to facilitate the nitrogen cycle. Such filters do a fine job of processing ammonia to nitrite to nitrate, but do nothing with the nitrate. It is often non-intuitive to many aquarists, but removing such a filter altogether may actually help reduce nitrate. So slowly removing them and allowing more of the nitrogen processing to take place on and in the live rock and sand can be beneficial.
It is not that any less nitrate is produced when such a filter is removed, it is a question of what happens to the nitrate after it is produced.
When it is produced on the surface of media such as bioballs, it mixes into the entire water column, and then has to find its way, by diffusion, to the places where it may be reduced (inside of live rock and sand, for instance).
If it is produced on the surface of live rock or sand, then the local concentration of nitrate is higher there than in the first case above, and it is more likely to diffuse into the rock and sand to be reduced to N2.
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/issu...t2003/chem.htm
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