DSB in a bucket

[Delphinus]

Yeah, I'm trying it for about 2 months now on my 90g.

Unfortunately I can't say it's produced any results for me. But my 90g, despite being a very low bioload tank, has been battling chronic nitrate buildup for at least the past 6 months. So it's hard to say whether it is performing but it simply cannot overcome whatever it is that's wrong with the tank (old sand maybe ?? Underskimmed? Poor design of the sump? I honestly don't know); or whether it's just simply not performing.

Just to give you an idea, in January and early February I did a series of approx. 60g water changes and eventually whittled the NO3 down to about 5ppm from about 30ppm. One month later it is already 10-15ppm. The only fish are a pair of ocellaris, there are some emeralds, two peppermints and some acro crabs. So it's not really a case of overfeeding. Probably about 100-120 lbs of live rock and 1" of sugar sand. I skim with an ASM G3X and I also grow chaeto out of this tank and it grows like a weed. Nothing seems to be able to keep the NO3 in check. I had high hopes for the DSB in a bucket but so far I can't claim to see any of the results that others were claiming.

But, what the heck, it's an easy enough thing to implement. I guess it's a case of you have nothing to lose by trying it (except for the money to put out to buy sand).