Wet/Dry into a refuge?

Anyone heard of converting a wet/dry filter into a refugium? I think my wet/dry must be the culprit of my nitrates - I do water changes, clean and replace filters, my skimmer is running 24x7, I feed very sparingly (as I've been told to because of my nitrates), I use RO/DI water now and still have nitrates in the 40 ppm range. So, after hearing a couple times that wet/dry's are nitrate factories, I've decided maybe I should try and convert it to a fuge or sump (not sure the difference). Anyone have pointers on how to do this? What needs to be done?

 

Yes it is very popular to convert wet dry's into a fuge's, however you must be very careful when removing your bio balls because they contain much of your tanks beneficial bacteria right now. It is recommended that you remove the bio balls a little each week and replace them with liverock rubble.

Also I noticed in a previous post that you have 40# of liverock in a 65 gallon. It's recommended that you have around 2# per gallon of liverock especially in a systems that rely on the LR for stabalization and filteration.

JMO....others may think differently.

S

 

I plan on adding about 20 pounds of live rock (actually base rock) to the display tank. Will this suffice you think?

 

why not make a de-nitrate coil to help with the nitrates. I have a wet/dry filter and a de-nitrate coil and my readings are 0 ppm. I will post some pictures of my coil that i just built. Its my second one. They are so easy to build, at about $30.

 

I thought about the coil, and I got scared off - sounded like if you didn't get it right one way or the other with how much water goes in, you get bad stuff back out. Plus, I've heard nothing but good things about sumps/fuges. Does anyone out there think one is better than another (between sump/fuge and denitrator coils)?