Jump to content
Premium Aquatics Aquarium Supplies

Need help, Bought a phosban 150 with npx bioplastics, diatoms....


Jenandcoffee

Recommended Posts

Hello all,

Im having a problem with my nitrates so I bought a phosban 150/ maxi-jet 600 pump with npx biopellets to see if this would help. It's been running for a week and now I have diatoms. I just noticed tonight that the pellets are not tumbling in the center and they look clumped up. I have the valve turned up full blast, I read online this was a good pump for the phosban. Any ideas on how to fix this? Also does anybody know if the the diatoms normal when using biopellets? Been doing water changes 2 x a week about 5 gal ( my tank is 22 gal)for the nitrates nothing seems to be helping... Not sure if this is the right forum to post but could could really use some help...

Link to comment

I have used bellets in two tanks. The first time I put them online they started creating major algae issues, i need up taking them down. I now have them up again on my newer tank. I haven't gotten any major algae issues, besides a small few inch patch of cyano, which when I start dosing mb7 and coral snow again it'll be gone. I also have been using a different pellet than before, i use Marine eco bac pellets instead of the TLF brand, much better IMO. I have same reactor and use a MJ Cobalt 1200. you want a fairly aggressive flow, that will help the clumping.

Link to comment

Went out today to a reef shop and had my water tested by them and it looks like my nitrates were not as much of a problem as II had thought, my api test was giving false readings. it was recomeded to toss the biopellets and changed to rowa instead so that's what I did.thanks for the reply!

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...

what do I do with the pellets since they are clumpy in the center, can I just rinse them? I'll go out today and buy a bigger pump.

If you do rinse them, make sure its with tank water .. Ro/di will kill off the bacteria and you'll be starting over. Rinsing will only buy you a little time. Since your bacteria are active they will quickly regrow and clump up again. My experience is that rinsing generally buys you 1-3 days.

 

Rather then getting a bigger pump you'd be much better off getting a reactor that is biopellet specific. All the "biopellet" reactors on the market suffer from the same fatal flaw except one (which i'll get to shortly). They all attempt to fluidize the pellets by directly or indirectly blasting water through them. Without going into the physics of it, this is a terrible way to fluidize large particles and will always lead to dead spots and dead spots lead to clumping and once that happens you pretty much have to start over. To illustrate this, every fall here in the upper midwest we wake to our weekend mornings to the sound of leave blowers cleaning up the neighbood yards. Leaves are basically large particles. If you took a pile leaves, put the leaf blower in the middle pointing straight up and turned it on what would happen? All the leaves directly above it would blow up and then fall back to rest on the leaves next to the leaf blower. None of those leaves outside the direct air stream moved even a little.... Dead spots. Now you could go out and buy yourself a bigger leaf blower to make the dead spots smaller...or... You could point the nozzle of the leaf blower so the air flows under the leaf pile. When you do that two things happen. The large particles (leaves) act as a barrier which soreads the flowing air out over a large surface area between the leaves and ground. Since they are not interlocked they also let some of the air pass upward and out through the top of the pile. This leads to fluidization of a large area where all the leaves begin to move and flow with the air. Suddenly, a blower that seemed to small can now move mountains.

 

There is a reactor designed specifically to do this with biopellets and it is available in 3 sizes - a nano which is a 1.5" OD x 12" tube for up to 20 gallons, a mid size (2.5" OD x 12" tube for up to 100 gallons) and a large 4" by 12" for up to 350 gallons. These all use a special plate under the pallets which directs the water flow under the pellets and across special lifting fins. This lifts the entire biopellet mass off the bottom so that you can actually see across the bottom under the pellets when it is running. No dead spots = no clumping. The best part is that like the leaf blower example above it is extremely efficient. The nano version runs on a rio 50 .. which actually has to be turned down to keep the pellets moving properly. Even the largest vesion only requires 250 GPH to effectively fluidize 1.5L of biopellets.

 

In the interest of full disclosure these are our designs and we make and sell these reactors. I dont know the forum rules on discussing one's own products so I wont specifically mention the product names or company until we can get set up as a sponsor (which we're working on). Suffice it to say that there are better solutions out there then getting bigger pumps. We have a mid size model that been running in a 29 gallon for nearly a year thats never been cleaned or had any clumping issues, and several others or various sizes in real word tanks from 1 - 8 months with likewise experiences.

Link to comment

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recommended Discussions

×
×
  • Create New...