Reuse Bio Block Or Start Over

[SeaFurn]

HI everyone - it's been a while.  I'm resetting my 45 gallon RFA tank.  It had become overrun with mermaids cup and I had been fighting a bad case of dinos for better than 10 months.  The tank had been running for over 2 years.  I moved 20 gallons of water from the 45, the 3 fish, and the biological filtration that was in the sump to a 20 gallon tank (bare bottom) for the time being. (I moved the RFAs to another tank.)  The bio filter consists of a piece of BRS dry rock and a Marine Pure Bio Block.   Once I gett the tank and sump cleaned up, I had been planning on simply starting the cycle over with a new block - maybe the Brightwell version this time - but now I'm reconsidering.  

 

It's interesting that there's been no sign of dinos in the 20 gallon tank since I moved everything into it. I was expecting it to show up on the rock or the block as there are literally 0 nutrients in the tank.   I know they are not gone and I know I'd be fooling myself to think that I'll be able to keep them out of the 45 once it's reset and I move the fish and RFAs back into it.  SOOOO - should I just move the bio block back to the sump and skip cycling a new block?  Would thoroughly rinsing it with clean salt water before moving it back make any difference?   Or just start over and let the tank cycle and run for a few months before moving the inhabitants back?

 

[Tamberav]

Dino is present in every aquarium. They just grow out of control when conditions favor it. 

 

Do you know what caused your dino? Was it low nutrients? 

 

Marine Pure block are advertised to 'reduce nitrates' - If it does indeed do that and your dino was caused by low nutrients then perhaps re-using it is not the best idea... but for different reasons. I personally never use them so I can't say how effective they are at reducing nitrates. 

 

I have never bothered to use one because they want 28 dollars for one which to me seems like a gimmick. Rock at my LFS is like $3/lb for dry. I also don't want low nutrients 🙂

[SeaFurn]

5 minutes ago, Tamberav said:

Do you know what caused your dino? Was it low nutrients? 

Yes, I think that was the culprit. I was skimming, doing my weekly water changes, but the mermaids cup exploded and nothing would graze on it and keep it in check and any nutrients got wiped. It didn't take long for them to show up at that point. 

 I tried all the recommendations to get rid of it.  So the same conditions exist in the 20 gallon now -tank has been running for month -  every test I do  0 nitrates, 0 phos - and there's NO algae at all.  The CUC I moved over has completely cleaned up the one rock and bio block. They won't last now.  But no dinos.  Maybe they'll make an appearance soon?  But still need to decide if I'm going to reuse this block or start over. 

[brandon429]

bioblocks sit passively and 99.9% of water jets around them not through them (takes path of least resis)

 

when they're functioning as denitrators, that passive flow still brings nitrate nearby for conversion, IF the mechanism is even occurring and its a fine concept lol until that determination point. 

 

if they were fitted to a pipe, and the pipe had positive pump pressure on one end they'd function as helpful surface area. The block is merely a helpful seed for bringing in new bac, which then take a while to transmit out to the new tank (a cycling chart has this timing pretty right, we constantly inspect job outcomes to find those charts validated)

 

a seven dollar bottle of biospira would instantly make any arrangement you have in the new tank ready, even if you toss the block and never use it again. After about two days swirling around after biospira, your surface is set in the new tank and is fully coated in bacteria and no degree of full water changes will unseat the cycle. The biobrick can be tossed at any time, from anyone's reef, even nine of them at once, and nothing ever happens one way or another. = gimmick agreed T. 

[SeaFurn]

11 minutes ago, brandon429 said:

bioblocks sit passively and 99.9% of water jets around them not through them (takes path of least resis)

Same thing for the once dry rock....right?  

 

15 minutes ago, brandon429 said:

The biobrick can be tossed at any time, from anyone's reef, even nine of them at once, and nothing ever happens one way or another. = gimmick agreed T. 

Are you suggusting anyone could toss out rocks just the same and nothing would happen??  

[brandon429]

Rocks are the primary source of our surface area, in 99.9% of reefs they jut up into the midwater and force water to take different eddy currents resultingly, they're shockingly good contact zones.

 

 

no, those would be the last of what I'd pull though if you want to be accurate just about any reef here indeed can instantly remove about half its rocks and still function the exact same way, on a seneye meter which accurately proves ammonia status in reef tanks. 

 

so with rocks we have a threshold that we dont cross with removal

 

but sand?

 

1000% removable. I have a six year thread with jobs as recent as last week where all we do is remove sandbeds instantly in giant and small reef tanks, all day long, year after year. 

 

sand and bioblocks and all bioballs and all sumps and all extra canister filters can be removed at once, we do this, the rocks left take over every single time.

 

reefers employ orders more surface area than what they need, its how the official sand rinse thread gets away with ripping out all their surrounding surface area and nobody has any recycles (using our method, using other removal methods expect a cycle and maybe total tank wipeout)

 

there was an old rumor that when we remove surface area, time must be given for surface area left in place to take on more bacteria/ but that's false

 

 

the leftover surface area gets reduced if more bacteria were added, not boosted. more bacteria fills up its tiny crevices, less water meets contact area, filtration efficiency drops. the old rumor simply made up an untested mechanism and with today's digital ammonia checkers, we can surely test/verify that the leftover rocks don't take on more bacteria they're  simply enough surface area on their own, without ramp up time. the entire sand rinse thread is removing sandbeds and all surrounding media instantly, giving no ramp up time, in statement of the new rules and findings. the new rules allow us more dynamic reef tank control without always wondering about lack of bacteria like the old days. 

 

our water currents regulate surface area on live rocks, bacteria don't stack to infinity they're sheared off at the right rates relative to the system design, independent from the other surfaces employed as extra padding.

[brandon429]

following that concept above about how water reroutes around bio bricks vs through them, sandbeds are the same way.

 

nothing is really pushing water down through them, along the path of the tank and out the other side if they sit on the bottom of the tank.

 

the bare minimal top zone is the mere contact area, all the 99% sand mass below it just sits there with aerobes competing with your fish for oxygen which also is in such surplus there's plenty to share. removing those beds is removing bioload, like removing a fish from a tank. nobody's reef crashes if you remove a fish, and we remove sandbeds in a certain order of ops such that nobody loses a reef. 

[brandon429]

here's a perfect keyboard model of surface area in reefing. 

 

X's are bacteria

 

 

 

lines, or _______________ are the surface area they sit on. here's a big surface area system ___________________________________________

 

here a small surface area system _______

 

 

so watch this

 

 

XXXXXXXX eight bacteria sit on this strip of live rock to the left. the contact zone for wastewater is above the X's not in between them, biofilm prevents water incursion. wastewater touches only the top of the X's

 

here's the same surface area but with double bacteria, stacked, like the old rules said:

 

XXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXX now you have eight bacteria still touching water, sixteen bacteria encased in biofilm where no water flows or very little. stacking doesnt increase surface area but it increases oxygen demand and waste output into the system because these are respiring aerobic filter bacteria. Thankfully, water shear cuts off the top row and carries them out via skimming, or as floc attachments to other substrates.

 

if I add more surface area look how many X bacteria fit: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

 

every reef tank needs a certain minimum amount of X's to run and just because the system is used to fifty X's, its minimum amount may be ten. you can remove forty at any time and the cycling remains the same as with the original amount. that's the entire mechanism  behind the massive massive sand rinse and removal thread. given enough practice its easy to just eyeball a reef tank and tell how much surface area it needs. Any degree of live rock in the display center was always enough, even when greatly pared down. that concludes the bacterial tmi for today lol.

b

[SeaFurn]

6 minutes ago, brandon429 said:

Rocks are the primary source of our surface area, in 99.9% of reefs they jut up into the midwater and force water to take different eddy currents resultingly, they're shockingly good contact zones.

 

 

no, those would be the last of what I'd pull though if you want to be accurate just about any reef here indeed can instantly remove about half its rocks and still function the exact same way, on a seneye meter which accurately proves ammonia status in reef tanks. 

 

so with rocks we have a threshold that we dont cross with removal

 

but sand?

 

1000% removable. I have a six year thread with jobs as recent as last week where all we do is remove sandbeds instantly in giant and small reef tanks, all day long, year after year. 

 

sand and bioblocks and all bioballs and all sumps and all extra canister filters can be removed at once, we do this, the rocks left take over every single time.

 

reefers employ orders more surface area than what they need, its how the official sand rinse thread gets away with ripping out all their surrounding surface area and nobody has any recycles. 

I should have mentioned in the beginning that I had almost no rock in the DT....only sand,  So I figured that while the sand was partly responsible for the biofilter, most of the filtration was done in the sump with the block and the one rock. 

 

So you may have answered my question for me. I intend to have much more rock in the DT this go around - although it won't be jutting up into the mid-flow.  The bottle of bio spria may be all that's needed and I can skip the block in the sump? 

 

[brandon429]

agreed that block can be tossed and never used and I dont think it'll help with nitrate either. I know many claim it does, I'd believe them more if digital measures were the ones reporting controls. the biospira will carry pretty much any bioload we want right out the gate as bacteria swirl around midwater, water changes could lower their helpful numbers, but in a day or three they've moved onto the new rocks and would be immune to water change removal. you'd have to medicate them off the rocks or boil/freeze the rocks or dry them. locked. 

 

source for claims, Dr. Reef's giant bottle bac thread which studies deposition rates for the major brands of bacteria on reef2reef.

 

if you get a dead bottle of bac, which I've never seen but also an enduring rumor, then all this goes bad lol.

 

folks tend to like to verify some degree of ammonia control in the new tank, before the commitment move over. for the love of pete don't dose to 2 ppm

 

only dose enough test ammonia to barely raise your ammonia kit off zero, then see if that amount clears overnite. if so its cycled. if it doesn't youre obviously using API or red sea as the ammonia kit

 

 elitist cycler's joke 🙂

[SeaFurn]

46 minutes ago, brandon429 said:

folks tend to like to verify some degree of ammonia control in the new tank, before the commitment move over

I'd be one of those folks...  and I don't test for nitrite....just wait to see that the ammonia has been processed into some measurable ntirate.  (don't have an ammonia kit)

[Tamberav]

Glad that my suspicion that bioblocks were a waste of money was right. Can’t believe they charge so much. I can’t imagine it costs a lot to make such a thing.
 

Now I have used some smaller type of media and sponges in canister filters for large QT tanks that are devoid of rock but canisters are designed for flow to go through them and the media is small so much larger surface area on the outside. It’s also not nearly as costly. 

[SeaFurn]

1 hour ago, brandon429 said:

I have a six year thread with jobs as recent as last week where all we do is remove sandbeds instantly in giant and small reef tanks, all day long, year after year.

And in my battle with dinos I too removed all of my sand so I knew it wasn't doing much.   

[SeaFurn]

5 minutes ago, Tamberav said:

Glad that my suspicion that bioblocks were a waste of money was right.

Saves me a little $ on this reboot.  I'm thinking I may actuall start a tank thread this go around. We'll see!