Terrible Advice Tuesdays: The Best Alternative To Live Rock
Terrible Advice Tuesdays: The only effective media for a saltwater tank is bioballs. Live rock won’t grow nitrifying bacteria
The rest of the story: I almost spit out my dinner when I heard this one. Both bioballs and live rock will grow nitrifying bacteria. And properly selected live rock – rock that is very porous is better for growing bacteria than bioballs. If someone tells you live rock won’t work for your tank, RUN!
Browse the Store! Questions?
But bio balls look so good doing not much of anything in the sump… And that live rock stuff takes forever to clean every week…
That reminds me I need my marigolds and the bleach bucket…
Wait… wrong salt water show…
I’m naughty… sorry… 😛
We just started with our SW setup 3 weeks ago today and the first thing we did was put in live rock We have probably the happiest tank around
no bioballs they should be called notsobio
perhaps I would be better off dumping mine and fill that space with live rock???? (this is a genuine question)
I would, Laurie. While they were considered a godsend at one time, as Mark states, quality live rock can hold more bacteria, dispersed more widely throughout your system. Bio balls concentrate a lot of nitrifying bacteria in a relatively tiny area and should something happen there, you’ll lose do much of your bio filter that you’re almost guaranteed a tank crash
@Laurie
Do it slow if you make a change. There’s a good chance that much of your filtration is taking place in the bioballs so you don’t want to just remove them all at once without something else to compensate for them being gone.
There are many people that do use them successfully though. One of the biggest drawbacks with them is that they trap a lot of detritus which builds up and can slowly leach nutrients back into the tank.
Go with the best looking dead rock you can find for the display and use seachem pond sized matrix (or equivalent in other brands) in the sump for nitrification. It has a much higher surface area than most live rock. Its much simpler, safer, and cheaper than bringing in that beautiful live rock at a very high price and a lot of nasty critters.
For quarantine systems, K1-Kaldness media works well and can be sterilized, put back in the main sump for re-population of bacteria, and reused for the next quarantine round.
Really interesting debate. is the truth debatable or is the question simply misunderstood? Indeed advertising, generational competitiveness and general hobby trends are the interference to true understanding of what ‘rock’ actually is! It isn’t voodoo or magic! ‘Rock’ is not ‘LIVE”. it is just a substrate. Bioballs are certainly not live and may very well have been made into toys or water bottles by some manufacturer. So what is the debate about?? BOTH are simple substrates for stuff to grow on. And nature WILL insist on growing something on them depending on what nutrient and light the external environment provides.
So it turns out we debate the ‘details’ on the GPS that gets us to a successful destination. 30 somethings LOVE to debate ‘my way’ over ‘their way’. But once the testosterone and member measuring is done, it becomes clear that nitrification is something you can’t stop from happening in the presence of water/oxygen and ammonium. I’ve seen it perform on substrates like sand, toy soldiers, plastic forks, chopped PVC and plastic packing strap ribbon. It then is a matter of long term performance vs short term performance. JasPR
If you have bio balls in your prefilter box it is a really bad idea. I had them in my prefilter on a 180 gal tank that’s a lot of bioballs. I was using them more as a baffle than anything else to quiet the drain.
In a power outage the the water stops flowing over them and I have been told and believe that the nitrogen cycle reverses and the bio balls can release ammonia back into the tank. This mostly happens because the bio balls are not submerged. When the power comes back on your tank gets spiked with ammonia.
Sounds crazy and maybe it is but, I experienced an ammonia spike in this situation in an otherwise stable tank. I have no other explanation for it. No more bioballs for me anywhere.
Truthfully it was only enough that I noticed something was wrong in the tank fish acted funny and it just didn’t look rite nothing died and i only found out through testing that I could detect ammonia in the tank where there was no trace before.
The material itself is actually irrelevant except as it pertains to specific surface area. All materials will exhibit the same characteristics under the similar circumstances. Which ever material you use, you should be looking for highest specific surface area that also minimizes clogging or can be quickly jostled about to free the surfaces. There are methods of using any material than can be dangerous in case of power outage, its best to keep whichever material you use submerged and if possible in flowing water because eventually the material and life forms on it will start to break down and cause issues.
+1 on using the Matrix. My tank has a compartment for bioballs that I have filled with Matrix keeping the drip plate in place to force the water evenly through it (the drip plate is submerged along with the matrix.) This is kind of the same sort of idea that Mark had with the My Reef Creations sump except mine is narrower so the flow through the Matrix is probably faster unfortunately. Mark promised a review on the sump and matrix but I haven’t found it. Have I missed it somewhere? I am interested in his observations using it.
Bioball will trap a lot of detritus which builds up and can slowly leach nutrients back into the tank.
You need to clean them without killing the bacteria every month!
I removed them long time back and my tank doing even better.
Keep your sump clean and live rock is the best.
Good Morning Reefers! Back in the day when I started my first tank people were using rolled up bails of the blue bonded filter pad you see in stores for drip trays etc. Of course it was taller/wider to accommodate the size of the bio space in wet/dry filters but that is what they used. I started out with two magnums and the added a Skilter Filter 250. The Magnums came with the system and it was fish and rock only so that was how I got started! It was free also! Now I have base/live rock in my wet/dry and a refugium tied into it also. Over kill but the tank was running great until I neglected it a little and got some algae problems. Redoing it slowly but surely!
Also the bail had a plastic mesh around it to keep it’s shape! I talked to a guy at the local Martins Aquariums store that set up tanks and that was what he used to get a tank to cycle. Actually it didn’t have to cycle because the bio bail was already seeded from the stores main filtration system. The guy would go set up the new tank and get everything running and then come back to the store and get a seeded roll of the bio pad! Worked great! I think the long haul on that would be the detritus build up in the bail if you didn’t keep a good regiment on rinsing out the prefilters and drip tray pads!
Another thing to take notice of is dentrifying capabilities. Bioballs pretty much do zero denitrification. I would think Seachem Matrix or Pond Matrix may be large enough and dense enough to perhaps contain an anaerobic zone in the core. Live rock is great at both, nitrifying bacteria hosting the outer layers and denitrifying bacteria hosting further within the LR.
Wet/Dry filter have their pros/cons. But using them is really just converting ammonia/nitrite into nitrate, leaving you with a nitrate level thats always increasing and with which you now have to filter/export through big water changes or the sometimes dangerous sulfur-type denitrators.
I have bio-balls in my sump, but they are just to add additional surface area. They are next to an under-baffle, and under egg-crate, rubble-rock and 10 inches of water. I fixed a panel in my sump a month ago, and they were fairly clean, no buildup of crap. Wet-dry trickle filters are not able to properly process nitrate, because of the dry part, and end up being like a neglected canister filter, just accumulating detritus that decomposes, and actually adds to the bio-load of the tank.
Whether or not “Live Rock” has enough surface area internally to denitrify is entirely dependent on the actual rock type. Pumice for example is very porous naturally occurring rock, that is almost never seen being sold as live rock. Mostly what I have seen is nearly solid rock with only a thin (relatively speaking) layer of life on the outside. There is a great deal of variance and is generally not denoted by whether the rock is fiji, etc.
Griseum is right on in his explanation.