Looking to get into biopellets

can you give us some detail on your setup? such as bioload and how much you feed and all the little details. I'm curious to figure out how biopellets haven't worked for you. it's not often that you hear someone using biopellets and it not making a noticeable dent on their nitrates. it's usually because of other reasons that people had bad experiences with them. is there such a thing as a possible bad batch of pellets?

 

It has been quite a while since I ran them so I don't remember all the little details, but I ran them long enough to try 3 different brands. 65g, the 3' long version. There was a maroon clown, betta, fuzzy dwarf lionfish, and a lyretail anthias at that time (still alive!). I fed about two small pinches of flakes a day and put in some ghost shrimp a few times a week. I now have the betta eating pellets and the dwarf eating frozen food so I don’t have to do that now (thank goodness). It’s possible that I just didn’t run enough pellets, but the tlf reactor was over half full when not running and when it got down to about 1/3 I would fill it back up. Nitrates were generally 50ppm to off the test kit and I never really saw any reduction.

I totally redid the tank and tried a floating scrubber for a while which didn’t work well. I did upgrade my skimmer and added a huge vida rock centerpiece but it wasn’t until I set up my automated vodka system that I got things under control. Nitrates last night were 1ppm. My vodka dose is 13.5ml. That is quite a bit higher than what most people run, but I have not seen any side effects like cloudy water or bacterial strings. I think the vida rock has a larger capacity for bacteria so the system can handle larger amounts of vodka.

 

to be honest, I had a similar experience with pellets. What I found was they kept things status quo (meaning my nitrate readings) and visible phosphate (algae growth) as opposed to lowering the numbers. It did seem to keep things from going up but then again, how does one determine it was the pellets vs. better husbandry on my part?

 

That is a good question and something that is nice to keep in mind with many "upgrades" we do. I think something like biopellets or any carbon dosing it should be easy to see changes because you are doing something pretty dramatic with the system, but it does take time.

A difficult issue with biopellets is the dosage. If the nutrient levels are keeping steady then one would think that an increase in pellets is needed, but it’s hard to determine how many pellets there are when your topping off the old ones as surface area changes as the pellets decrease in size and you can’t tell how much of the near microscopic pieces of the pellets or old pellets are in the display. 2 cups of pellets isn’t very exact when dealing with carbon dosing. That is one reason I prefer liquid dosing. You can dial up and down the amount with precision. The carbohydrates that biopellets are made of can also be utilized by other organisms such as cyano and other organics they release may not be as bioavailable as acetate or ethanol.

Not to say biopellets don’t work. They can work great, but didn’t for me. I just think that liquid carbon dosing has many advantages. Plus if the power goes out or the reactor clogs you could have a real problem with hydrogen sulfide.

 

Okay this is my BP story on my 40 gallon mixed reef tank

Equipment
TLF Reactor Modded (Took out the mesh rings and replaced it with knitting screen)
ECO 396 pump (Started off with the mj1200 but it wasn't enough flow and they where constantly clumping up)
250 ml of Ecobak pellets
Aqua Remora Protein Skimmer

My nitrates are super low usually in the .2 area I feed my corals and fish a lot of food on a regular bases I am a heavy feeder. Before BP my nitrates would get up into the 10 range if I skipped a water change. Now I can go weeks with out a water change if I wanted to and my nitrates wont move. So my BP did an awesome job on my nitrates but when it came down to my phosphates it was a different story. I would get small spots of cyano on my sand bed and rocks and whenever I tested my phosphates there where in the 1 or slightly greater range. The reason for this is the bacteria that are growing on the BP's consume something like a 4:1 nitrate to phosphate ration so they would make a dent in the phosphate levels but there weren't enough nitrates in the water so that the bacteria could consume all of the available phosphates. Long story short I ended up buying a second TLF reactor to run some gfo in and haven't had any problems since. Both levels are now super low and the tank looks better than ever. Im actually thinking of doing a semi zeovit just to keep my levels from getting too low lol.

Hope that helps. I would go with a larger pump for you tank worse come to worse u can always reduce it with a valve. Thats a lot easier than having to go out and buy another pump trust me lol