DSB in a bucket; anyone?
 

Has anyone tried this out? I think I'm going to but I'd love to hear anyones experience(s) with this idea...

I tried it, about 60lbs of aragonite sugar sand (2 30lb bags anyhow) in a 8g Kent salt bucket.

Never did a thing for nitrates for me. But YMMV...

what did you use for flow BTW?

I fed the bucket using a MJ1200 powerhead in the sump.

I suppose if you have the sand it's worth a try, but, if you had to go out and buy the sand there might be cheaper ways to deal with excessive nitrates. A coil denitrator would probably set you back about $20 in materials.

I have also tried a sulfur reactor, but like with the DSB-in-a-bucket, I have mixed feelings about this method too. Having said that, I'm still running the reactor (I just used a calcium reactor and then bought some sulfur denitrator media). (Well, for that matter, I'm still running the DSB-in-a-bucket too. It's just that I've never had nitrates under 30ppm on this tank, despite a good skimmer and despite a low bioload. I've never quite figured why this is so) The problem with the sulfur reactors is that it is easily overwhelmed, anything beyond the slowest of flows introduces too much oxygen into the reactor and the bacteria population crashes. Maybe a different reactor would work better. Anyhow, most people who try sulfur reactors swear by them. The theory is sound and *most* people have good luck with them.

Interestingly, my nitrates fell to 10ppm after the introduction of two larger clams into the tank a couple weeks ago. I've been tempted to ditch the DSB-in-a-bucket and the sulfur reactor and just buy a few more clams :)

more clams........;)

I am just about to begin running this system and will create a thread to document it over the next few days.

There is 250 lbs of sand and it is 10" deep in a big Septic Tank (Never Used :) ) bucket.

The bucket will only be fed water run through a 50 micron filter system so no solids can get into the sand.

:P You won't need to with the Zeovit system you're running Keith. Phase III Zeovit has 0 nitrate readings.

Indeed, if you're running Zeovit, I wouldn't bother with this method at all, there would be no returns on it.

Trust me, it's not the shiznit that Calfo makes it out to be...

This will be on another tank. Not the one using ZeoVit.

You are may be right about it not working but I have a tank with nitrates around 10 (Not to high I know) and I am going to give it a shot.