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Old 03-26-2015, 03:29 AM
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I'm not sure we know enough about corals to say whether something beyond low nutrients, lots of flow, stable parameters, and good lighting "helps" them.

They keep the nitrates low, as advertised. Whether they help, hurt, or hinder corals beyond that... who knows. There's lots of opinions in both directions. No one even knows what any one brand of solid carbon is specifically actually made of (we know what family of compounds they probably are, but none of the manufacturers publish specifics), how much of said compound makes it in to the water column, what that compound does to coral metabolism, exactly what said compound does to the microbial population of your tank (or where it does it), or what, if any downstream effects it has on the micro and macro fauna of your tank's ecology.

Literally the only thing that's "known" about them is that adding them to your tank in some fashion will reduce testable nitrate in the water column after some period of time, and there's some established biological principals to suggest a reasonable hypotheses as to why. But that's at the most macro of levels, eeeeeeeeverything else, including all the specifics and what other effects they may have, is no better than a guess. Like many of the products sold in our hobby, if you dig deep in to the things lots of people believe about them, you'll find that most of our accepted 'body of collective forum knowledge' can be traced back to some off-hand comment made somewhere by a person who probably knows as much about marine biochemistry as I do about quantum computing, or marketing material published by the people who make a living charging you 70 dollars for a 27 cent bag of plastic beads.

anyway I don't mean to be all ranty, but you asked what the 'best' brand was. 'Best' implies there's some metric against which to evaluate them. Beyond how effective they are at reducing nitrates, and whether they tumble well in your reactor, there is no such metric. All of them seem to be equally as effective at reducing nitrates, and which ones work best in your reactor depend more on your reactor than the pellets.
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