Is there a best Bio-pellet?

[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.

[jason604]

does it just remove nitrates from water or does it do anything else special to help corals?

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.

[asylumdown]

I'm not sure we know enough about corals to say whether something beyond low nutrients, lots of flow, stable parameters, and good lighting "helps" them.

They keep the nitrates low, as advertised. Whether they help, hurt, or hinder corals beyond that... who knows. There's lots of opinions in both directions. No one even knows what any one brand of solid carbon is specifically actually made of (we know what family of compounds they probably are, but none of the manufacturers publish specifics), how much of said compound makes it in to the water column, what that compound does to coral metabolism, exactly what said compound does to the microbial population of your tank (or where it does it), or what, if any downstream effects it has on the micro and macro fauna of your tank's ecology.

Literally the only thing that's "known" about them is that adding them to your tank in some fashion will reduce testable nitrate in the water column after some period of time, and there's some established biological principals to suggest a reasonable hypotheses as to why. But that's at the most macro of levels, eeeeeeeeverything else, including all the specifics and what other effects they may have, is no better than a guess. Like many of the products sold in our hobby, if you dig deep in to the things lots of people believe about them, you'll find that most of our accepted 'body of collective forum knowledge' can be traced back to some off-hand comment made somewhere by a person who probably knows as much about marine biochemistry as I do about quantum computing, or marketing material published by the people who make a living charging you 70 dollars for a 27 cent bag of plastic beads.

anyway I don't mean to be all ranty, but you asked what the 'best' brand was. 'Best' implies there's some metric against which to evaluate them. Beyond how effective they are at reducing nitrates, and whether they tumble well in your reactor, there is no such metric. All of them seem to be equally as effective at reducing nitrates, and which ones work best in your reactor depend more on your reactor than the pellets.

[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.