Let's talk about bio load.

[Aquattro]

Originally Posted by Proteus

Maybe bit load should be based on amount of food you use.

Do we weight it per gallon?

I have a 6" angel, a 4" tang, 8 Bartlett's Anthias (2"), a Leopard wrasse about 4 inches, 2 clowns and another anthias (Lyretail). 50 frags. 3 LPS various sizes. 40 snails. 2 abalone. Some sand snails.

107g of water, 50 pounds of rock. Give or take.

We call this medium? Heavy? Light? I dunno. I picked medium because it's in the middle

[Proteus]

Originally Posted by Aquattro

Do we weight it per gallon?

I have a 6" angel, a 4" tang, 8 Bartlett's Anthias (2"), a Leopard wrasse about 4 inches, 2 clowns and another anthias (Lyretail). 50 frags. 3 LPS various sizes. 40 snails. 2 abalone. Some sand snails.

107g of water, 50 pounds of rock. Give or take.

We call this medium? Heavy? Light? I dunno. I picked medium because it's in the middle

I guess a pound of food is a pound of poop regardless of how many fish

[Aquattro]

Originally Posted by Proteus

I guess a pound of food is a pound of poop regardless of how many fish

No, would depend on age of fish (is fish growing still?), temp of water (effect on metabolism, etc). A pound in is not a pound out. And sand beds complicate the equation. What gets retained in the sand vs bare bottom. What gets removed as solids in a filter sock if you use one?

This is complicated

[Proteus]

I guess you would have to find a way to calculate the time it takes your tank to process a days waste. Having a number value to the amount of organics in the water column. You could turn a day into sections. 4 hours to process the waste is low 8 hour medium and so on.



But I'm not tgat kind of smart

[The Guy]

Pretty confusing subject! I kinda thought bio load depends on how many fish you have. Sea_Horse Fanatic or Anthony as some of us know him has a 160 g DT and lots of fish and I know he considers it heavy bio load, hopefully he'll see this thread and chime in and shed some light for us.

[christyf5]

I consider my bioload medium and the skimmer I have is "realistically rated (TM)" for 250gal or 180gal heavy bioload. It seems to do ok and I've never not had algae (except for that one time) so it does as well as I expect it to.

I generally gauge my bioload on fish type and size. Tangs eat a lot and crap a lot and I have a "enough" of them so I'd consider myself medium bioload leaning towards heavy-ish.

Interesting question. I also am interested in how people relate their bioload to skimmer size and "over skimming". Is this even possible?

[mrhasan]

My theory (as if anyone cares):

Testing of bio-load has to be through titration but instead of adding drops of some chemical, you have to keep on adding fishes till you see (whichever comes first):

1. Sudden growth of algae
2. Sudden deterioration of water quality
3. Do water change more than you would like to

When any of the three results matches, you have a heavy bio-load. Small bioload is the point where you don't see any fish in the tank (or you are an irrational environmental activist) and medium would be anything between small+1 and heavy-1.

[riceboy]

I'm gonna get flamed for this but oh well, lol in my tank (100 gallons ish) i have naso tangs,blue tang, yellow tang, kole tang, 2 clownfish, 8 green chromis, male& female manderin goby, 3 square anthias, diamond goby, and a handful of hermit crabs and emerald crabs, so pretty heavy bioload. I still do my checks for phosphate (which is 0.02ppm according to the hana checker) and have never really checked for nitrates. I'm using the csc 250 skimmer and it works great for my system, although i think they have discontinued that model As for the DC pumps they are pretty good pumps, just thier controller power supplies are garbage, and to be honest when I had my dc pump i never once adjusted my pump level.