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Re: Keeping Quarantine Tank Filter Media in a Planted Tank
In trying to set up new tanks recently and use old filter media I discovered
something surprising, too. It didn't appear to handle a moderately light
fishload from the get-go. Although it appeared to work well when I was
setting up a heavily planted aquarium with co2 and the works, I assume there
wasn't much residual ammonia, anyway, probably got the tank seeded with
bacteria and handled some small leftover.
My assumption is that there is more biological filtration going on within the
tank than in the filter. I could be wrong, but that is my suspicion.
I recently lost my *biofilter* in a really lightly-populated fish tank. The
ph dropped something below 6.0, but not sure by how much, and ammonia and
nitrites became more measurable, in spite of adjusting pH up. So it appeared
that they not only lost their activity (ammonia and nitrite consumption) but
even began to die off due to the low pH. I threw a nitra-sorb in the filter
to handle the ammonia and nitrite and it's done it's job. I'm just too
chicken to take it out and wait and see what happens . . . I've got chocolate
& croaking gouramis in the tank.
If you resolved the ammonia problem by dropping the bioballs into the filter
unit, it appears that the media you initially used in there was not cultured
well. Actually, before using the nitra-sorb, I tried bioballs (or stars?)
that had been in another filter and that didn't work for me.
Sylvia
> We tried that recently and it didn't seem to work. After two days, we
noticed
>
> ammonia building up in the quarantine tank. We've resorted to frequent
> emergency
> water changes and replaced the media with bioballs from one of the trickle
> filters. Luckily, the quarantinees are doing fine but our self-image of "
> expert
> aquarists" has taken a beating.
>