Sulfur denitrator experiment

[reeferaddict]

Mine is still keeping everything at zero....

[Delphinus]

I'm so happy for you. And thanks for the plentiful and bountiful suggestions on getting mine to work! You rock!

[reeferaddict]

Why Tony - I have a whole thread on the matter! In your defense, it seems to be a 50/50 split as to whose works and whose doesn't.

I have about 2 litres of media for close to 200g of system volume with about a 8 - 10 litre per hour of output. A few times mine has clogged as the aragonite dissolves and I have to open up the valve to "flush" the effluent, and I end up with the wonderful rotten egg smell, but other than that it has been pretty much set and forget except for the initial cycling which I wrote about in my thread. One water change of about 10% per month and still zero nitrates - I was pulling my hair out and going through a hundred bucks a month in salt before this little beauty.

In retrospect, considering the time I have been limited to with my system in the past few months, it would be just a green wavy sea of algae by now without this wonderful little gadget!

[Delphinus]

Originally Posted by reeferaddict

Why Tony - I have a whole thread on the matter! In your defense, it seems to be a 50/50 split as to whose works and whose doesn't.

I know you do, but in all fairness there isn't a lot of info in there for people who want to duplicate a reactor. If I found a Koralin 1502 or whatever then there's maybe enough info. As for nitty-gritty details like whether it's upflow or downflow, pressurized or not, detailed time-based data on the #'s as the unit cycled, and so on .... you neglected to mention those! So sorry for razzing you but seriously, you were dancing on my misery so I had to give you a hard time about it.

In retrospect, considering the time I have been limited to with my system in the past few months, it would be just a green wavy sea of algae by now without this wonderful little gadget!

Would love to be able to duplicate those kinds of results .... well we'll see what trial #2 brings. It's not as easy as "just put some sulfur in it and turn it on and then angels will sing songs in praise of your reef" otherwise I wouldn't be still scratching my head on this one.

[Delphinus]

Ok was able to tinker around a bit and got the plumbing switched around so the reactor is now an upflow. And I see the mag2 will be more than enough pump because it completely fluidized the entire media column. Before I continue I'm going to have to go get a round sponge (fluval etc.) to make sure the pump intake doesn't suck in media.

And I switched the feed to use my dripline off my overflow. I normally use this to drip in new arrivals. I put an irrigation dripline needle valve and was able to dial down the feed to 1 drop per 10 seconds and I have room to slow it down more.

So .. tomorrow I'll hopefully be able to finish off the upflow mods and get this going again. I've just gone from bummed to stoked! Hopefully there will be some learnings we can share from all of this in the end.

[AndyL]

Not loving that feed, simple reason - if you cut power etc - you risk introducing air... These reactors work in an anoxic (low oxygen) or anaerobic environment, introduction of air (due to say return pump failure / turning it off for maintenance) would harm the bacterial culture.

Low tech fix - mechanical float - similar to RO / top off floats... So if water level drops below a set height it cuts off flow.

Lower tech fix - add another valve as a cutoff for maintenance (if your like me - add a reminder label to the plug / switch for the pump) and prayers go a long way I'm told

[Delphinus]

There's already a shutoff valve, so the pump maintenance angle is covered.

In the case of a power failure .. there may be some air introduced .. I'm not sure how to completely eliminate that variable. I had also thought of using a separate feed line from one of the overflow chambers but it's basically still the same problem, in a power failure it will siphon until it sucks air.

There are a couple mitigating factors though, which I thought might have been enough: (I dunno, maybe not? I realize it's not foolproof but this is why I decided to chance it...)
- the reactor sits lower than the sump wall, so the reactor itself doesn't drain. There's always water in the 2 chambers.
- With an upflow and the output of the 1st chamber fully open, and on top, any air will escape out right away. It might make 1 pass through the media but hopefully no more.
- They say when the reactor's cycled, that you can increase the flow-through, so obviously the media can handle some O2, just not a lot. (??)

Anyhow, this is the only way I can see to slow down the flowthrough considerably from what I had before. Since you can increase the flowthrough once it's cycled I was hoping to change the feed once again to something else (after all I want my drip acclimation feedline back sooner or later).

But if it's no good then it's no good.

I'll try seeing if the recirc pump is enough to draw water from the sump, before going online. If that will work then it's not too hard to ensure that the input is always submerged. Thing is there are a lot of bubbles in the sump so the odds of sucking in the stray air bubble are also nonzero in this situation either. Although probably less and also don't have to worry about the power failure scenario.