Sulfur Denitrator: Who's running one?

[ereefic]

I tried to gravity feed my reactor and it didn't work well at all. Not sure why, but i'm running it now (feeding it with an aqualifter pump) in a bucket to hopefully cycle it there and then move it to main system.

It ran for about a week at about a drop a sec. and never saw the effluent putting out ), but that is probably because of the gravity feed. The rector seemed to do a vapor lock type of thing and when i'd vent the air out, somehow it would get more air in it, the pump would chop it up and i'd be back to square one. Hopefully the aqualifter is the answer.

I'll post a couple of pics of the setup shortly. Maybe you guys will some something wrong that I don't.

 

[ereefic]

The reactor is 6x20 with a Mag 2 asthe recirculation pump, flow bottom up. I have 4L of the Matrix with a few inches of the LSM sulfur. I added the effluent line out the side instead of the lid so I can vent out the top without touching the effluent rate.

 

[black71gp]

awesome looking reactor thats the same size I am building my first chamber nice to see how much 4L of matrix fills it up..

what size system are you running it on?

 

[Klownfish]

;D

 

[ereefic]

The 4L of Matrix is about 12".

I've got this on a 220gal. (roughly) system. My NO3 is topping out the Salifert test kit. I also just hooked up a RDSB as well. I don't care how my NO3 gets down, just as long as it does.

 

[black71gp]

keep us updated sounds like it will work great thats the size i will be building for my 1200 gallon system.. nirtrates around 50...

 

[Klownfish]

Any pictures on how to use a Coralife Ca reactor and tie in a Phosban reactor? I'm tagging along, all the way from Michigan. Good thread!

Cna someone PM me about what can be used instead of Rowaphos to remove or bind Phosphates? The "other" option, works like the Caribsea NO PO4?

And Thanks...

 

[Phyl]

Here's the picture of ours up and running:

This was the first time we set it up. Since then Carlo's suggested less of the sulfer media, so we're trying it that way now. I can't comment on how the change performs because it is just starting to cycle again.

We had our aqualifter quit on us, so we had to clean it out and start again. Man does that thing stink when it skunks.

We're using GFO to bind phosphates, so I'm not sure of the "other" option.

 

[jamesbuf]

I've read through the whole thread and am intrigued about using the Matrix media to support extra biological growth. I've got a few questions.

1. I thought the bacteria has to actually colonize on the sulfur beads themselves. Is there enough sulfur in the water in the reactor to allow the bacteria in the Matrix to preform the needed chemical reactions?

2. I'm using the Calcium reactor media inside my reactor like Korallin advised, to help raise the pH of the effluent. I see other people on here using just sulfur in their main reactor and have a second chamber for Ca media to raise the pH before it hits the tank. My question is whether the bacteria grow better in a lower pH or a high pH?? I would think the bacteria growth would be hindered by a more acidic environment, as when there is no Ca media inside the main reactor. Thoughts?

 

[Carlo]

From all my testing and expertise I've found it best to use a large amount of media that can host the biological denitrifing bacteria in the reactor. The sulfur beads themselves aren't porous enough to do this.

Matrix works but I've found something that works even better but since I sell it I won't/can't comment on it in the general forums. The basic idea is to fill the reactor with highly biological supporting media and only using enough sulfur to kick start things and provide a fuel source. The media does the work while the surfer gets things going.

The calcium media is optional and really depends on the overall pH of the tank. It surely won't hurt to drip the effluent though a 2nd reactor (of some sort) to maybe help bring up the pH and add some calcium to the tank but it's not going to be much compared to a full blown CA reactor. You'll get much better results from just using a simple Kalk drip!

The bacteria from what I've seen aren't pH dependant as long as you are at least in the 7s (haven't tried lower pH levels). From everything I've studied and tried the bacteria population more directly tied to the nitrate levels you have passing into the reactor. The higher the number the bigger the population will be and the lower the nitrate level the less population there will be. This is the advantage I've found to using more biological media and much less sulfur media. The overall tank conditions control the reactor as opposed to the amount of sulfur you use.

The downside to using any SULFER DENITRATOR is that you are throwing off the ionic balance of the tank. It's really wise to do 10% weekly water changes when running a sulfur denitrator to keep the ionic balance in check. If you want more info on this just ask. I'm pretty sure Randy wrote a piece on this that I could find or I can dig up my findings or this and post them to give you a better understanding of what I'm talking about.

Carlo

 

[Klownfish]

Any other updates? Thanks for the picture, Phyl. I'd like to try it with my Coralife Reactor.

 

[wsurf4me]

I did a DIY version of the reactor using Carlos recommendations as my guideline, brought my nitrates on 150 gallons from 10 to 0 in appx 3 weeks. However with all good things there appear to be a couple of compromises that hopefully Carlo or someone here could help with.

First is Cyano, I've had cyano problems with my 2 month old frag tank, nitrates are 0, PO4 is 0.02, main tank is spotless however the eggcrate and plugs in the frag tank seem to be an attractive surface for this stuff. In one of Carlos posts he mentioned he had a solution for cyano, I would be very interested in how to deal with this.

Second is the alk consumption, I had to really ramp up my Cal reactor to compensate for the alk dropping. I don't suppose there's much you can do about this how do most people compensate? supplements or crank the reactor? at some point will the cal and alk get out of balance?

 

[Phyl]

Fresh egg crate leaches. It usually settles back down after a couple of months. If you'd like to discuss product recommendations, it might be better to address it in the Allquatics forum.

 

[Carlo]

I did a DIY version of the reactor using Carlos recommendations as my guideline, brought my nitrates on 150 gallons from 10 to 0 in appx 3 weeks. However with all good things there appear to be a couple of compromises that hopefully Carlo or someone here could help with.

sure thing

First is Cyano, I've had cyano problems with my 2 month old frag tank, nitrates are 0, PO4 is 0.02, main tank is spotless however the eggcrate and plugs in the frag tank seem to be an attractive surface for this stuff. In one of Carlos posts he mentioned he had a solution for cyano, I would be very interested in how to deal with this.

It's not a specific product or anything. Just good husbandry. First if you are able to test 0.02 with a hobby test kit your phosphates are too high. Secondly any time you see cyano or any type of algae growing you know you have excess nutrients in the tank or they simply can't grow. So knowing you have a bacteria (cyano) or possibly (Diatoms which often get confused with cyano) you know you have to much phosphates in the tank.

The key is to get them reduced and the brown/red "algae" will go away on it's own without having to resort to a bandaid approach using one of the red slime removers.

I'd go with a slow drip of a lanthium product near the skimmer input pump. The lanthium will precipitate out your phosphates and the skimmer will remove it. I'd also clean any sponges or similar material often if using a lanthium based product.

In addition to or instead of lanthium go with the white pellet type phosphate remover like Phosguard or similar and run it in a reactor. Don't bother running it in a bag as that's pretty useless. The white type of phosphate remover works much faster then a GFO (rust colored) type product. When using either product rinse well before adding to your system to get rid of any silt.

Change out the Phosguard often (4 to 7 days) to keep it fresh and so it doesn't leach back into the system. Once the phosphates are not measurable and you see the bacteria/algae starting to disappear you can change over to a GFO based product which usually doesn't leach back into the system and last longer. It just doesn't work as fast as the white pellet type so that is why I recommended going that route first.

Also what you can do is bump up your pH slowly and try and get your system up to 8.5/8.6 if at all possible for a while. Don't worry as this isn't really that high and many of our corals come from places in Fiji where they are at 8.5/8.6 most of the time. You can do this by dripping calcium hydroxide (kalk/limewater) from a sealed container. Make sure it's sealed so you don't end up dripping calcium carbonate (what happens when it mixed with CO2 in the air). If you go the calcium hydroxide route keep an eye on your alkalinity and try not to go over 11 dKH.


If possible check your magnesium levels and bring them up to NSW levels of 1285. Mg is the 3rd most prevalent item in SW after chloride and sodium and plays an important part in keeping pH stabilized. Too many people never check Mg and have pH problems because of it. You can slowly raise the level by about 100 ppm per day. Some people have had great success pushing the levels to 1400-1500 ppm Mg when fighting these.

You can also achieve a bit better pH buffering by also checking your Boron levels and maybe making a slight adjustment to this. Many salt mixes are low on Boron which is one of the component that help control pH but to a far lesser degree then carbonate or bicarbonates. It's still worth checking any maybe pumping up to 10. This is about 2 times NSW levels but still not as high as some salt mixes like Seachem's salts which come in at 15 (used to be much higher then that).

While the Boron test/adjustment is optional I'd definitely get your Mg tested and brought up to at least NSW levels of 1285 to help with your problem.

I'd also suggest checking silica if possible. If you don't have a test kit get your LFS to check it for you. It could very well be a diatom problem or dinos instead of cyano (look similar to many people) and silica plays an important part for them. If you find you have higher then normal silica levels you can use a product made by Sera Marin called Silicate Clear that works pretty well at reducing these levels. It's the best product I've found thus far that is now commonly available (new product by Sera). I've been testing it for some time now and it works pretty decent. Much better then the silicate adsorption claimed by phosphate/silicate products.

Second is the alk consumption, I had to really ramp up my Cal reactor to compensate for the alk dropping. I don't suppose there's much you can do about this how do most people compensate? supplements or crank the reactor? at some point will the cal and alk get out of balance?

I'd carefully watch how much you ramp up the Ca reactor because you could push your calcium to high. Alkalinity consumption goes hand in hand with how nitrate reactors work. Without going into the chemistry/details lets just say it throws of the relationship between "normal" calcium and alkalinity use by your system. Your coral update of both is still the same only your system now has "other chemistry" going on that requires/burns off more alkalinity. You'll probably find you can still use a calcium reactor/lime water drip to maintain your calcium levels but will have to manually adjust your alkalinity buffer with a carbonate/bicarbonate source. If you choose your product of choice correctly this will help with keeping your pH up too.

I'd start with these items first and see what happens. It will take some time but you'll be improving the tank a lot as your go.

Let me know if you need any help or need any part explained more,

Carlo

 

[pecan2phat]

Hi guys,

Great read!

Wanted to ask a few questions. Has anyone used DeNitrate vs Matrix in their reactor and if one was to go with an ORP probe, can the probe be placed at the effluent point such as a drip cup or does the probe need to be ported into the sulfer reactor?

Thanks.

 

[Phyl]

We used Matrix, so I can't help you there. I can tell you that the we couldn't get our probe to read negative on the AC II. So we have it ported in for no good reason. I don't believe you can read the ORP on the effluent though because part of the equation in there is the lack of oxygen. Once it becomes effluent it is no longer oxygen starved.

 

[pecan2phat]

Makes sense on the probe issue. Thanks again.
I was going to try a Pinpoint monitor since the website states that their monitor can read -2000 to 2000 mv.

 

[Phyl]

Yeah, we thought about picking one of those up just to read the negative ORP, but just don't bother reading it.

 

[jamesbuf]

I'm hoping you guys can help me out.

I've been running one of the Korallin reactors for a few months now. The reactor was originally a Ca reactor I got for only $50, and figuring in the $90 I spent on the sulfer reactor conversion kit from marinedepot, I definitely conider this one of the best $140 I've spent in this hobby. My nitrates were hoving around 50ppt and have been 5ppt of less since I setup the reactor. My corals definitely positively responded to the lower nitrates.

The trouble now is that I've been battling low pH in my tank for about 1.5 months, barely getting to 7.75 during the day and dropping as low at 7.55 at night. So I decided to test the pH of the effluent coming out of the sulfur reactor. Its ranging between 6.9 and 7.1. It doesn't smell like rotten eggs though, and I though this was the sign of it being too anoxic. I even re-setup my fuge to help raise the pH at night. Not helping much. The conversion kit did come with Ca reactor media which I included inside the reactor. Any ideas on how to help with this problem. I even have the outflow dripping into the outflow of my skimmer to help with agitation when entering the tank. ARG!

I broke down and ordered the Ca reactor that Carlo suggested here:
http://www.njreefers.org/forums/index.php?topic=4121.msg38629
I got it on clearance for only $99 at premiumaquatics.com Woo Hoo!
http://www.premiumaquatics.com/Merc...roduct_Code=ESU-33504&Category_Code=Clearance
The nice thing now is that I can convert the sulfer reactor back to the Ca reactor for when my kalk stirrer no longer meets my Ca/ALK needs. I do plan on using my ACIII to control the ORP in the Coralife reactor. I also plan on adding some Matrix like Carlo had suggested. It just makes sense to me. More places for the good bacteria to grow. Will controlling the ORP help with my pH problems??

Last question for Carlo. Where did you get that special connector for your ORP probe that reverses the ORP readings?? Do I still need to do this for my ACIII??

Thanks for any help you guys can offer.

 

[jamesbuf]

Forgot to mention, my Ca is 440 and my Alk is 3.8meq/L.