anyone still using biopellets?

If so, what brand? reactor? results you have you seen in lowering nitrates?

I only ever looked into using biopellets... went as far as buying a bag of pellets and a reactor but never actually ran them. Read scary stories they worked too well and stripped out nitrate/phos to the point the corals were starved/killed.

Instead, I got marine pure blocks, Dr Tim's Waste Away and dosed NoPOx. my nitrates used to always hung around 25-30 and phosphates close to 1ppm... now they are down to 5-10 nitrate and 0.1-0.25 phos. They were actually lower than that and almost wiped out my dragon breath algae. I cut back on dosing NoPOx and now all is well.

I just started to use EcoBak with the desktop media reactor. No complaints so far. Nitrates have always been low so I used about a 1/3 of the recommended amount for my 25g


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

They never did anything for me except make the water look like diluted antifreeze. May not have given them enough time but won’t be trying it again!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Jeremy, any reason other then excessive nitrates your looking to use them. I always had high nitrates due to the amount of large fish I keep and the amount I feed. Been using them for probably close to 10 years now so any questions I can probably answer. I would have text you but feel any info I can share on starting biopellets would be beneficial to the whole community.

Thanks Jason. The reason is mainly to lower nitrates but I've never been one to chase numbers and just gone by the look of my tank but now I'm starting to question if I can get better color and growth rates. I also feed heavy. Some of my corals although decent color have not grown much from before and after pictures after a year. I tested Nitrates with an old Salifert and it was if I'm reading it right at 50. I'll text you later.

In all honesty I've never really like the salifert kit for testing nitrate. For some reason it was giving me a false reading one time and I could never find out why. I also tried the red sea nitrate kit and really didn't like that one either. Now I go with the API nitrate test kit so if it were me I would get that kit, see what that one says and we can go from there.