!!!!??? It's happening again!

[Reef Pilot]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

So it turns out you actually need to be kind of careful with MB7. After dealing with a cyano issue with an aggressive dosing of chemi-clean, I stepped up the use/change of GFO and started dosing the 'start up' dose of MB7 for high nutrient tanks, which in my tank worked out to about 70ml a day. I missed a couple of days to go up north over the holidays, but otherwise I was pretty religious about it, including turning off the skimmer.

I ran the inlet/outlet lines of the BP reactor in a bucket of salt water for the first 4 or 5 days after the chemiclean treatment while I started dosing the MB7 because I have no idea what chemiclean does to biopellets and I didn't want a bunch of excess organic carbon to flood my tank, potentially giving the cyano a leg up over the MB7. When I put the reactor back online with the tank, I put about half the daily dose of MB7 directly in to the pellet reactor to get things going again.

Now, I have to say I was extremely suspicious of MB7, and bacterial supplements in general. I've used them before and never saw an effect of any kind, and I've always been highly suspicious of aquarium supply company claims in general (they use as much pseudo-scientific non-sense speak as the alternative health industry), as well as being suspicious that a bacterial product could have anything living in it by the time you bought it at the store.

Well, I suppose the proof is in the pudding -



That disgusting pile of what looks like mucous is 1/4 of the goo that I had to eject from the outlet hose of my recirculating biopellet reactor yesterday. In less than two weeks of dosing large volumes of MB7, that outlet hose, which has remained clear and free flowing for nearly 2 years, clogged up so badly with that crap that water completely stopped flowing through the reactor. It's recirculating, so there was still some movement of water inside the reactor, but with the outlet blocked it slowed down enough that massive orange sized wads of white bacterial mulm had formed on the surface of the pellets that were largely stuck together.

The foam pads in my GFO reactor have also completely clogged up with bacterial mulm, causing the entire column, along with the foam pads, to rise all the way to the top of the reactor. Something that also, in nearly 2 years of running the tank, has never happened.

I've gone down to the daily maintenance dose of MB7, which if I'me measuring the volume of a 'drop' correctly, is about 6ml, so hopefully this stops happening.

Had to go back to you tank thread, and this is the post I am referring to. You said you took the reactor offline for 4 or 5 days and then you say you put it back online after that. You also added MB7 directly to the reactor at that time (and again wondered why the heck you would do that!!).

So, with it offline, the reactor (and bacteria) was obviously O2 deprived. And the effluent (carbon laden bacteria) had no where to go (supposed to go to the inlet of your skimmer). The build-up was probably the carbon laden bacteria, that was probably dying, too, with a lack of O2. You didn't mention hydrogen sulphide smell at this time, but could definitely have been present then, too.

The way bio pellets are supposed to work, is that bacteria forms on the pellets and they get digested and sloughed off with the nitrates, and need to be removed by your skimmer. If they make it into your tank, they will fuel cyano, if no other competing bacteria has been established (like MB7). That's why I don't understand at all the point of a recirculating bio pellet reactor. You want that digested carbon out of there as soon as possible, and into your skimmer.

Here are a few more links.
http://npbiopellets.dvh-import.com/i...-it-works.html

http://reefbuilders.com/2010/10/19/b...pellets-cheap/

http://www.vertexaquaristik.com/Port...lets%20FAQ.pdf

[asylumdown]

ooooh, I see. I think you misunderstood what I did. My reactor is designed to be external or internal. At that point its effluent line was tubing slightly wider than RO tubing, and in the inlet line was a bit larger than that. They're both flexible and a couple feet long.

When I say I took it "offline" I mean that I filled the big Salinity bucket I keep to store spent filter socks with salt water, put a small koralia in it pointed straight up, then put both the effluent and intake line from the reactor in that bucket while I was dosing with chemiclean. The reactor physically stayed in the sump and remained running, it just wasn't using water from the tank. The bucket was well circulated with tons of surface agitation so it shouldn't have gotten anoxic, but yes, for less than a week that it was like that all the organics that sloughed off would have built up in that closed system.

However the salinity bucket is like 7 gallons compared the the reactor's 2 or 3, and when I put it back 'online' with the tank I tossed all the water in the bucket, so 65% of whatever had built up got flushed. If that was enough to kill something, pellets aren't for me anyway.

[Reef Pilot]

Yes, and by offline, I do mean your bucket. That is a pretty tight loop, so water would still be O2 starved even with your koralia. And the presence of all that mulm/muck build-up could be trapped or dying carbon and nitrate laden bacteria, that isn't being flushed out into your skimmer.

And after you put it back online with your tank, the mulm/muck probably continued to build inside your reactor because your outlet was partially plugged.

I may have missed it in all your posts. But does your reactor effluent go directly to your skimmer input?

Despite all that, I am not saying either that was the direct cause of your current problems with your SPS dying. But it may have started the ball rolling, and caused other things to get out of whack. If your ammonia is high, though, sure does seem like a mini crash happening...

Again, I would do massive water changes. And keep that bio pellet reactor offline until everything stabilizes. Then you can start again with getting your nutrients under control, but this time, do things slowly and gradually, and watch your tank and corals closely to see how they are reacting.

If you look at the beginning of my tank journal, I started with a 100 ppm nitrate tank, with very high phosphates (after inheriting a 10 year running tank). It took me a year or more before I finally got everything under control. But has been running clean (zero nitrates and near zero phosphates) for a couple years now, and growing SPS like crazy.

I know your tank was looking great with all your SPS before, too. So with a bit of patience, I am sure you can do it again.

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

Yes, and by offline, I do mean your bucket. That is a pretty tight loop, so water would still be O2 starved even with your koralia. And the presence of all that mulm/muck build-up could be trapped or dying carbon and nitrate laden bacteria, that isn't being flushed out into your skimmer.

And after you put it back online with your tank, the mulm/muck probably continued to build inside your reactor because your outlet was partially plugged.

It's possible, but I'm ok with agreeing to disagree. That happened long before I had any of the issues we've chatted about with the reactor. It was before I treated with chemilean or dosed any MB7. At that point I had never seen any mulm of any kind in my reactor, and the effluent line flowed freely with barely any biofilm in it. It had been that way for almost 2 years, and I checked regularly. I wasn't kidding about how pronounced of an effect MB7 had on the system overall, only the 'effect' was the production of copious amounts of equipment wrecking, filter sock clogging goo (It would start overflowing after about 8 hours instead of 24), not really anything I would have considered beneficial.

That bucket also would have been rapidly depleted of any nitrate it contained, so over those 5 days mulm production would have been practically non-existent. I noticed a little bit of detritus in the bottom when I emptied it out, but only because I was looking for it. I suppose it's possible the O2 levels still fell, but certainly not low enough to produce a rotten egg smell. Maybe that means my reactor wasn't actually working at that point and that's why my cyano problem was so bad?

I only started seeing mulm and clumping inside the rector after MB7, and that was after the bucket thing. It wasn't until after I finished the two week start-up dose that I started having problems with the effluent line clogging. After it clogged the first time (I caught it before the reactor went rotten), I had to remove and blow-out the effluent line every couple of days. I eventually started filling it with bleach in my sink, which bought me about a week before it was completely clogged again. Before MB7, it was set and forget. After MB7, it needed daily attention and completely melted down when I didn't have any to give for five days.

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

I may have missed it in all your posts. But does your reactor effluent go directly to your skimmer input?

Yup. When it was the super small flexible tubing, it sat right inside the intake pipe of my skimmer. After I modified it, I had the effluent pipe directly above the intake pipe. It probably allowed for a lot more bypass that way, but it was the best I could do at the time. I actually just picked up the parts to build an intake manifold that forces the effluent in to the skimmer, but my pellet reactor is currently sitting in my kitchen sink awaiting disassembly and storage so I'll never get to use it...

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

Despite all that, I am not saying either that was the direct cause of your current problems with your SPS dying. But it may have started the ball rolling, and caused other things to get out of whack. If your ammonia is high, though, sure does seem like a mini crash happening...

Again, I would do massive water changes. And keep that bio pellet reactor offline until everything stabilizes. Then you can start again with getting your nutrients under control, but this time, do things slowly and gradually, and watch your tank and corals closely to see how they are reacting.

If you look at the beginning of my tank journal, I started with a 100 ppm nitrate tank, with very high phosphates (after inheriting a 10 year running tank). It took me a year or more before I finally got everything under control. But has been running clean (zero nitrates and near zero phosphates) for a couple years now, and growing SPS like crazy.

I know your tank was looking great with all your SPS before, too. So with a bit of patience, I am sure you can do it again.

yes to all of this, only that I'm not going to go back to pellets. They worked great for me for almost two years, but literally all of this started because I was trying to fix an out of control cyano problem. Experience and research suggest that was directly exacerbated by the pellets, so pretty much everything I've done and all the damage that's taken place has been the result of me trying to treat a symptom while desperately trying to hold on to the source. Why I never had it before, or why it started when it did, or why some people manage to escape it, I don't know, but once it got started it was unstoppable. Since the corals have started dying again, a few more patches have shown up - mostly on dead skeletons (both fresh and old, I think they harvest phosphate directly from the skeleton), so going back to the pellets now seems like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. I still believe pellets can work, but for whatever reason they stopped working for me. I just wish it didn't take losing thousands of dollars of coral to figure that out. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about nitrates in the future, but if it's organic carbon it will probably be 5% vinegar added by a doser.

At least this way I can light the fuge chamber of my sump again and start stocking it with macro algaes. I didn't want the light spill-over hitting the reactor, so it's been dark fuge.

[Reef Pilot]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

I only started seeing mulm and clumping inside the rector after MB7, and that was after the bucket thing. It wasn't until after I finished the two week start-up dose that I started having problems with the effluent line clogging. After it clogged the first time (I caught it before the reactor went rotten), I had to remove and blow-out the effluent line every couple of days. I eventually started filling it with bleach in my sink, which bought me about a week before it was completely clogged again. Before MB7, it was set and forget. After MB7, it needed daily attention and completely melted down when I didn't have any to give for five days.

This is the part that makes no sense to me. I actually experienced the opposite with MB7. It cleared up mulm in my tank and sump, and my bio pellet reactor (Vertex) always worked perfectly, with no build up of anything. Plus I did a lot of research on RC about MB7 before using it, and never did I see your type of experience with it.

Perhaps adding the MB7 to your reactor made the bio pellets dissolve more quickly (worked too good) and it overwhelmed the ability to discharge the carbon laden bacteria waste, esp with it recirculating. Just another theory...

Oh, and what kind of skimmer do you have? How much gunk do you pull out in a week?

[asylumdown]

There is no question whatsoever in my mind that my reactor was very poorly designed for all the potential conditions the pellets could create. It absolutely could not evacuate water fast enough as it was originally built.

Worst $500 I ever spent.

[FishyFishy!]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

There is no question whatsoever in my mind that my reactor was very poorly designed for all the potential conditions the pellets could create. It absolutely could not evacuate water fast enough as it was originally built.

Worst $500 I ever spent.

Would have been better money towards a calcium reactor

I sure hope everything works out for you bud! This is by far the worst part of this hobby.