General Update
General Update
I finally started my 55 gallon Upside Down Sand Bed (UDSB) tank. I’m wondering if anyone knows anything about dosing vodka into the inlet to the pump so that it is driven down into the plenum and then upward through the deep sand bed. It could foster lots of beneficial bacteria. It could also cause problems.
I believe that the UDSB may be running too fast. I am using 11 inches of coral gravel and sand but I may be using a pump that is too strong. I am unsure of proper contact time or the time that the water takes to travel through the bed.
As I mentioned before, the cloudiness in my tank did not subside much after I discontinued feeding and dosing for 4 days (again I am not skimming). After hooking up the UDSB, the tank became crystal clear right away. The bed became a huge mechanical filter.
Actually, I don’t want the UDSB to filter out the feed that I add to the tank nor do I want it to become a food trap. I will have to slow down the through flow rate or isolate this tank to allow the water to re-circulation through the bed over and over again and then pump a small amount of the UDSB water at a time, back into the main tank. Like the vodka, I don’t have the bed there to lower nutrient levels. Instead, I want it there to stabilize water chemistry through the dissolution of the sand.
I have not gotten any other changes to the tank yet. My pH in still stuck 8.2, despite additives. Calcium is at about 460. Everything else is good. The tank has not very populated and the nutrients all continue to run at zero. The one exception is that the phosphate reading popped up to .1 briefly, after a very heavy feeding but came right back down again.
Perhaps the scrubbing at the same time as dosing too much vodka may have run the tank too lean. When I had a mature scrubber running before, I sometimes over scrubbed by running the lights to the max time. When did that, I had to add fish fertilizer to keep things fed and clean as a swizzle. Now my nutrient numbers are great but I have some dye off of a little of the calcareous algae. Hopefully Marc shed some light onto my guess.
I have also noticed that before I stopped dosing, some of the white dead rock started turning deep green. It is not hair algae at all and it is not a slim. The snails graze over it but their passing does not change it at all. I never had this stuff before. It looks good but I want purple, not green.
Also, after holding back the dosing, the scrubber started to grow algae. This is something that I expected. I had my first harvest. It was a small one but its looking good. I guess that the V-bacteria were competing with the scrubber.
My dosing will have to be very strategic.
