Is there a best Bio-pellet?

[ReEf BoSs]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

I'm presently using the Nitraguard cubes. I much prefer them to the biopellets for two reasons:

1. They are relatively cheap compared to the pellets. 40 bucks for a year's supply at the rate my tank is using them

2. I believe the bacterial action is actually taking place to some degree on the cube, as opposed to in the tank.

I have biopellets that I accidentally dumped in to the skimmer chamber of my sump over 2 years ago. They're still there. They haven't shrunk, changed shape, nothing. To me this says there's very little bacterial action taking place on the pellets themselves, I think the tumbling of the pellets in the reactor wears them down and releases microscopic quantities of whatever plastic they're made of in to the water (which would explain why it takes so long for them to start "working"). With the biocubes I'm sure there's still some amount of sloughing, but they're made from a much spongier material that actually seems to biodegrade. Within a couple of weeks they change colour and start to shrink – think a block of swiss cheese melting from the inside out. The ones that have been in there the longest look nothing like the cubes that originally went in went from a mixture of red/brown to brown/dark brown.

So nitraguard cubes don't have to be tumbled in a reactor ? If that's the case that is real easy.

[asylumdown]

The instructions recommend something called the 'bomb' method, which is putting them in a bag with an air stone so that they're constantly surrounded by high flow and turbulent bubbles. People who have not been able to successfully implement this method have reported less success with them in terms of nitrate reduction.

There's drawback to the bomb method, such as getting it to work without the bag and air stone floating above most of the pellets and the salt creep the bubbles will produce. My tank has durso style overflows, which produce a hurricane's worth of bubbles, so I just put the bag in the my filter sock and have a custom cut piece of foam sitting on top to limit salt spray, and it seems to work fine.

[Janeallisonn]

Thanks for the info guys! I think I'll try out the Nutriguard cube bomb and see how she goes.